The Light & Shadow Salon presents: Antidotes to Chaos, a RAFT Salon
PART II: Falling Birds and Other Omens
[ID: image is a black and white illustration depicting a figure lying down on a rounded surfaces. They are looking up to many flying birds and flames.)
Doors: 7pm
Tickets: £7 - £15
This event is part of the Raft Festival programme (see the main festival page on our website for full listings).
One-off tickets are available for every Raft event on a sliding scale basis. We encourage you to consider purchasing a ‘festival pass’ bundle ticket which will allow you, at a reduced rate, to access a given number of events across the full programme (either 5 events, 10 events, or all 30 events). See the link below for more details about these options!
The Light & Shadow Salon presents
Antidotes to Chaos- A RAFT Salon
PART II: FALLING BIRDS AND OTHER OMENS
Join us tonight as we shift perspectives to explore other languages and points of view, in an attempt to mend and re-member...
Featuring the words, music, images, thoughts of:
Helena Hunter and Mark Peter Wright, Dzifa Benson, Labeja Kodua Okullu, Marta Michalowska, Jordan Blanchard and Chiara Ambrosio
Helena Hunter works at the intersections of visual art, poetry and performance. Her artworks utilise poetic and performative modes in relation to environmental change and biodiversity loss, often blending sites such as the field, lab, gallery and museum.
Falling Birds was part of a project for The Horniman Museum, illuminating the ongoing environmental crisis in relation to bird species, through a blend of larger-than-life X-ray images of extinct and endangered bird specimens from the Horniman’s Natural History collection, and fragments of poetic text.
One in eight of the world’s bird species is currently threatened with extinction.
What songs extinct and endangered birds might sing?
How might we hear their stories?
What might their representation in the Museum hide and reveal?
Helena created the film with Mark Peter Wright. Their collaborative practice, Matterlurgy, investigates the critical ecologies of environmental change, across disciplines and media, combining the production of artworks with co-constructed events, exhibitions and live performance.
Marta Michalowska is a curator, commissioner and artist working across film, photography, installation and public programmes. She is Co-Director of Theatrum Mundi.and also Director of The Wapping Project, a London-based non-for-profit organisation commissioning and producing new works in visual arts, film, literature and theatre.
Lunar Caustic: A Memory within a Grain of Salt is her prose poem, combining chemistry (AgNO3) and reflections around a photograph that was one of the starting point for Sketching in Ashes, Marta’s novel about war, violence, and looking for one's place.
Dzifa Benson is a Ghanaian-British multi-disciplinary artist whose work intersects science, art, language, the body and ritual which she explores through poetry, theatre-making, performance, curation, essays and criticism. Dzifa will read excerpts from her new manuscript, which explores imagined episodes in the life of Saartjie Baartman who was brought over to Europe from South Africa in 1805 and displayed in fairs and shows in Britain and Paris as the Hottentot Venus. Her physique was seen as reason enough to perpetuate the idea that black people are only one step above animals in the Great Chain of Being. A lot has been written about her by academics, feminists, black people, journalists, scientists, politicians. Here is an attempt to channel what the poet imagines Saartjie Baartman would have said.
Labeja Kodua Okullu is a Ghanaian-British writer who lives in London. After studying English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, he went on to complete The Novel Studio writing course at City, University of London and is currently working on his first novel. Labeja has published poetry with Forward Poetry and Rattle magazine and has essays with The Smart Set magazine and has contributed a poem to Interior Realms published by Theatrum Mundi.
Jordan Blanchard is a poet who writes for the folks back home. Born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, her work is an homage to the mess of the bayou. In 2021, Jordan earned her Bachelor’s of Art Degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Westminster, London. She is currently studying for her MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. Her first collection, river muck, baby is out now.
Chiara Ambrosio is a filmmaker and visual artist working with animation, documentary, sound and the printed matter. Pieces of Bob is the portrait of Bob, a man with Alzheimer's, and of his daily practice of re-building the world anew. It is a celebration of the myriad ways in which all that is lost can be made up for by all that remains- albeit fragmented, confused and incomplete. It is an observational piece about how meaning is gleaned from new coordinates once language and common shorthand crumbles away, and the challenges and discoveries that this brings about.