Ross Macfarlane on The Magical London of Edward Lovett, followed by a presentation of Mark Fisher & Justin Barton's 2017 audio essay/immersive sonic installation londonunderlondon
[ID: image shows three small objects that might be magic; the first is a brown-ish cast of a hand, attached to a small metal clasp. The second is a rusty-coloured stone, also attached to a metal clasp. The third is a small model of a black cat with blue eyes holding a small white ball, maybe a ball of string.]
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!
7pm: The Magical London of Edward Lovett
Edward Lovett (1852-1933) amassed one of Britain’s largest ever collections of folk objects and was particularly active as a collector of folklore in London. This talk will offer an introduction to Lovett’s life, his now scattered collection and how he saw the accelerating growth of the city in the early 1900s as an incubator for magical practices and beliefs.
Ross MacFarlane is a Research Development Specialist at the Wellcome Collection. He has researched, lectured and written on such topics as the history of early recorded sound, mermaids and London's lost books. He has led guided walks around London on the occult past of Bloomsbury and on the intersection of medicine, science and trade in Greenwich and Deptford.
9pm: londonunderlondon
londonunderlondon is a hypnotic 90-minute audio essay originally made in 2017 by Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, musing on London’s underground history. First presented as an acoustic haunting at London’s Corsica Studios, it will be presented once again at The Horse Hospital as it was originally intended - in the dark, unaccompanied by visuals - for the first time since Mark’s sad departure.
Justin Barton is a writer and sound artist for whom theory consists of maps for escaping from ordinary, dead reality, and for whom art is a perceptual, oneiric and hyper-abstract means of escape.
Mark Fisher was the author of Capitalist Realism and the editor of The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson (both Zer0 books 2009). His writing appeared on his well-known blog k-punk and in The Wire, Frieze, Film Quarterly and Sight and Sound.