LOST SENSES is a living space for encounters, open every day to everyone. Revisiting the exhibition as format and exploring the gallery space as a fluid cultural site, artists and practitioners will work in close relation with people reorganising the self’s relation to perception. The purpose is to create new collective experiences and ways to actively participate in everyday life. The notion of direct material experience in modernity has fallen into a semantic crisis, which does not leave enough space for live moments of embodiment.
LOST SENSES is structured around a one-month campus aimed to experience and enjoy senses, remembering that embodiment is not just textual but consumed by a world filled with smells, textures, sights, sounds and tastes. Generating a re-opening of senses exploring otherness, lost and participation, everyday life will be critically tested as a never static reality made of bodies, time and experiences. Mainly working as a hub for thinkers and a space for reverie, LOST SENSES will promote daily live experiences to engage diverse audiences through meaningful inter(actions), opening up reflections on a wider scale through processes of documentation and mediation.
The campus wants to reflect on the Now: to reorganise, open and reshape senses, generating broader reflections on our own identities, our communities and beyond.
PROGRAMME:
7TH AUGUST: Opening Act 6pm to 9pm
Programme Presentation
Laura Wilson - Four
Wilson presents a new performance with four bodies in response to the peculiar architecture of the space, using a pre-determined score and the building’s supporting pillars as starting point for this new live work. Featuring dancers: Elina Akhmetova, Iris Chan, Piedad Seiquer and Lucy Suggate
Lawrence Lek & Clifford Sage - Live & Ambient
Simulation artist Lawrence Lek and CGI artist Clifford Sage will come together in occasion of LOST SENSES opening for a live audio-visual performance.
FREE
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8TH AUGUST: SYNAESTHESIA 6pm to 9pm
COLLISION: HOA x TMT
In a celebration of multidisciplinary collaboration and solidarity, artist Julia Cheng, Creative Director of the all-female dance company House Of Absolute and curator Kerry Campbell, Director of TMT Projects in Luton, are presenting their first collaborative projects, showing the power of connecting local and national artists, as well as launching a home grown T-shirt line. The launch will take place at LOST SENSES in a collision of diverse practitioners in visual art, contemporary dance and live music.
Featuring works and live performances by: Ffion Campbell-Davies, Lula Mebrahtu, Julia Cheng, Grace Woodcock, Saskia Horton, Paloma Proudfoot.
FREE
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9TH AUGUST: TASTE 7pm to 10pm Curated with Isabel Blanco-Fernandez
Charles Michel - Food Painting #2
"Food is not art. Art can only be seen, and heard. Food satisfies the primal necessity of eating, and hence can't elevate the spirit.”
Throughout history, museums, monuments and galleries have been temples for the appreciation of visual and auditory stimuli. Rarely, artists have stimulated the proximal senses of Touch, Taste, Olfaction (the so called “lower senses”) to convey meaning.
But paradigms of aesthetic appreciation are changing. Recent brain science research suggests that touch, smell and taste are the mediators of powerful emotions that shape our identity, culture and wellbeing. What we put in our mouths is the most direct way of interacting with the environment - food is the nature we embody. And flavour, the only experience where all the senses come together.”
This Food Painting Performance is based in abstract expressionism using food pigments, relational aesthetics, crossmodalism and culinary art. Guests will be invited to eat the painting, and drink fine wine.
*tickets on https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/taste-food-painting-2-tickets-36467776100
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10TH AUGUST: Performing bodies 6pm to 8pm
Harold Offeh - Selfie Choreography: Performing with the Camera
The workshop will playfully explore the potential of the body, actions and gestures as recorded through cameras, exploring how actions and movements can be developed for and mediated by the device. Drawing on histories of video art, performance and dance, participants will have the opportunity to explore links between movement and live recording, allowing speculative and playful forms of choreography and performance.
FREE: to participate bring your smartphone
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11TH AUGUST: Cyberformances 2pm to 7pm Curated with Fabio Paris
JODI - ZYX-ap
Leading pioneers of net art, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans - the Belgian-Dutch duo behind the artist collective JODI - produce new media works that play with the increasing presence of technology in our daily lives. JODI disrupts and disassembles ubiquitous software, video games, and popular internet platforms such as Google Maps and Twitter, cultivating coding malfunctions and programming glitches. Concerned with exploring the chance, uncanny products of these system breakdowns, Heemskerk and Paesmans will challenge the public of LOST SENSES through motion tracking capabilities.
FREE
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12TH AUGUST: Cyberformances 2pm to 7pm Curated with Fabio Paris
Pier Giorgio De Pinto - Node bodies
Node bodies is a performative project of interactive participation by Italian-born and Swiss-based transdisciplinary artist, performer, curator, theorist and media trainer Pier Giorgio De Pinto. The installation makes each of us, in a random way, a potential knot to be decoded, the source of which has been taken from the immense rhizomatic world of the web.
FREE
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13TH AUGUST: Family Rave 2.30pm to 4pm Family workshop FREE RSVP https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/family-rave-parentguardian-child-workshop-tickets-36618359499
5pm to 6pm Public Performance
Georgia-Lucas Going - Parent/Guardian & Child Workshop
For LOST SENSES Georgia will be running a workshop for Parents/Guardians & their children.
Investigating emotional labour/care, role play, hierarchies & trust through dress up, movement & portraiture. Her own Mother will also be attending and taking part in the workshop. Please wear clothes you feel comfortable in moving around freely.
Performance: 5pm. Georgia will be performing with her mother.
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14TH & 15TH AUGUST: SYNAESTHESIA 10am to 12.30pm and 2pm to 6pm
Luli Perez - Internal Contexts
Internal Contexts is structured around the format of the forum, one online on: http://internalcontexts.boards.net/thread/1/internal-contexts-navigation, and the other happening over two days in the context of LOST SENSES. Through the forums, Perez will explore how neurodiversity may not be integrated in the language we use as consistently as it would benefit us all and how changing this can bring a new arena of possibilities - of knowledge of ourselves and others, of how to create strategies to navigate adversity.
A team of collaborators would commit to work on both forums and with the audience; physiotherapists, health professionals, psychologists, artists, choreographers and dancers, cognitive neuroscientists, the curator, etc, who would be working together with the audience directly in a set of live sessions that would range between: verbal forum (10am-12.20pm) and body forum (2pm to 6pm). Sound by: Antonio Mingot.
FREE
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16TH AUGUST: Soundroom 7pm to 9pm
Sharon Gal - In Resonance
The solo performance for Lost Senses explores the voice and its relationship with space. It's a journey between “inside” and “outside”, highlighting the inter-relation of voice and body; presenting the voice as a catalyst emerging from within, penetrating and affecting the outer world and carrying with it the depth and power of hidden emotions to reveal the subconscious underlay as it rises to surface.
Diana Policarpo - Panacea
The 6-channel sound installation explore the overlap between experimental sound, cybernetics and sciences. Panacea is a complex process driven sonic poem that attempt to piece together fugal systems, played out against the noise of economic collapse and machine crash at the deserted border of control. It is a sonic poem or an algorithmic composition, with a very hybrid and abstract form, that explores the potential of the alchemical process of sound as a matter and metaphor of a circuit of global energies in constant transformation.
FREE
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17TH & 18TH AUGUST: See things differently 10am to 1pm both days
Katharine Vega - The Eyes of the Night
*KIDS ONLY (age 8 to 12)
On Monday August 21 a solar eclipse occurs over North America: a strange moment where the moon shows herself in the day. Just for a moment we see the structure of what we live inside and how the lighting system of the earth actually works. A group experience for humans that we are little beings dwelling on a globe circled by the moon and orbiting a star. The eclipse is a special event marked throughout history by many cultures and it was a photograph of an eclipse in the last century that proved Einstein's prediction of light bending around the Sun from his general theory of relativity. Moments of anomaly, the unexpected, order going topsy turvy: these are vital moments to learn deeply about how things really are.
Let’s view this eclipse as a portal into seeing differently and new understandings. Let’s explore new perspectives by turning how we see upside down and inside out.
This workshop uses performance, storytelling, light and darkness to explore vision and the cycles of earth and the heavens. Exploring myths of the moon and eclipse, story-telling, performance games and devising with a multitude of props, prisms and lights. We’ll look at vision as a creative and biological process: the way in which the brain creates images from showers of impulses on the optic nerve, how we see with other senses than sight, optical illusions and dreams.
To end the workshop groups will devise a performance using light, prisms and props to tell their own stories of the dance of darkness and light, heaven and earth.
FREE: Reserve you place here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/see-things-differently-the-eyes-ofthe-night-tickets-36582990710
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19TH AUGUST: TASTE Curated with Isabel Blanco-Fernandez 12pm to 9pm
Luca Bosani, Nataliya Chernakova & Federico Guardabrazo - Physical&Digital Appetites
A resolve to limit physical pleasures that leads to both introspection and self-exposure.A discipline exercise on diet, work, and documentation.
Sonification. Big data brought to the tangible, mundane reality via tableware. Always faster, more connected.
Food as gender signifier. A reconfiguration of visual lexicons, stereotypes and codified behaviours. One-day long installations, from noon, and one-time performance - at 6pm. One-hellof-a-drink (bring cash). FREE
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20TH AUGUST: gigs 6pm to 9pm
Cactus band and more to be announced.
FREE
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21ST AUGUST: Spoken words Jam 6pm to 9pm
Joshua Leon, Thomas Kaniok and more to be announced.
FREE
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22ND AUGUST: OVER 50s 4pm to 5.45pm
Andrea Maciel - BE – 2 – IN: Body connectivity
The act of doing an action together involves sensorial cooperation, negotiation of time/space, coordination of forces engaged in a dynamic of mutual trust. It has many possibilities within it as choice, chance, resistance and surrender. Participants over 50s will play with time, space and the energy existing between bodies in the process of doing an action together, working on elements such as body connectivity, sensorial led movement, conscious cooperation, movement awareness and imagination as catalysts for changing motion and behaviour. The session explore the dilatation of usual sensorial abilities behind spontaneous everyday life gestures and from there, initiates a series of creative provocations.
FREE: RSVP here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/over-50s-be-2-in-body-connectivitytickets-36467738989
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23RD AUGUST: 3pm - 8pm
Rhine Bernardino - THE OFFERATION
Bernardino’s practice incorporates elements such as time, interval, duration and repetition using the body as framework and context in a process of introspection of the self. For LOST SENSES, she will be collaborating with performance artist Jonathan Cohen and a sound artist Nicholas Pervez to highlight what's inside and magnify it outside. The aim is to create a space that provides a path for the observer to be connected to the observed, a place to listen, to look and to investigate.
FREE
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24TH & 25TH AUGUST: Exchange Surfaces 24th: 1pm to 4pm / 25th: 11am to 2pm
Tom Railton - This, but made out of That
*KIDS ONLY (age 8 to 12)
This, but made out of That is a live workshop over two days for kids age 8 to 11, looking at sculptural materials, making and states of matter in a fun, experimental context.
Day 1: Plaster, wax, clay, alginate. Positives, negatives; liquids, solids; casting from life.
Day 2: Hot metal mini-foundry: Pewter. Jewellery, coins, textures and holes.
FREE: RSVP here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/exchange-surfaces-this-but-made-out-of-thattickets-36512753629
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26TH AUGUST: Performing Subcultures
Guests to be announced
FREE
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27TH AUGUST: Taste 2pm to 8pm Curated with Isabel Blanco-Fernandez
Bea Bonafini - Agape Banquet
Before it was a service, Mass was a meal. Between 0-364 AD, Christian communities put aside their obligations and gathered for agape ("love" in greek) feasts around a table in order to commemorate the Last Supper. As the writer Alain De Botton points out in his book Religion for Atheists, there is an almost universal lack of food venues that help us transform strangers into friends. The focus is never on opportunities for extending and deepening affections. During the daytime, Agape Banquet will become a space to learn the making of fresh pasta, a centuries-old Italian domestic tradition that is both a therapeutic and sculptural act, bringing the community together in a slow, hands-on process. What is sculpted collectively by day will be eaten communally by night along dressed-up tables. Following the definition of an Agape Restaurant, there will be open doors, a modest entry fee for the supper, and a seductive interior. In its seating arrangement, participants will be mixed and reconfigured, signalling their allegiance to a spirit of community and friendship.
*tickets on https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/taste-agape-banquet-tickets-36615885098
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28TH AUGUST: Documenting Actions 11am - 6pm
An experimental format of all-day screenings exploring ways to document experiences of
embodiment. The works selection will prioritise emerging artists with a strong interest in live actions and performative/documentary practices.
FREE
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29TH AUGUST: Performing Subcultures 7.30pm to 10pm
Jay Jay Revlon - Vogue Fem Workshop and Jam
“Vogue femme is fluidity at its most extreme with exaggerated feminine movements influenced by ballet and modern dance. Styles of vogue femme performance range from dramatics style (which emphasizes stunts, tricks, and speed) to soft style (which emphasizes a graceful, beautiful, easy flow). There are six elements of vogue femme: hand performance, catwalk, duckwalk, floor performance, dips, and spins (unofficial). When competing in a vogue femme battle, contestants should showcase all six elements in an entertaining fashion." - from Voguing Performance
Doors Open @ 19:00
Class Starts @ 19:30 Warm Up and 5 Elements
Class Finish @ 21:30 Warm Down & Questions
Jam 22:00
FREE
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30TH AUGUST: Soundroom 6pm to 8pm
JocJonJosch - o
In past works the Anglo-Swiss collective have used their bodies to test the limits of collective and individual identity. For LOST SENSES they will work with sound and the body to devise a vocal performance based on a corruption of the collective name 'jocjonjosch'. By a process of reduction and repetition, the utterances that occur will render the original name meaningless at the same time as evoking a sense of familiar humanness.
FREE
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31ST AUGUST: Performing Bodies 4pm to 5pm and 6pm to 7.30pm
The Uncollective & Sara Sassanelli - LOW KEY
Low-key involves experimental dance artists, The Uncollective (Eve Stainton and Michael Kitchen) and independent curator Sara Sassanelli working to unpack judgement within a performance space through our dancing bodies. By acknowledging that their bodies hold different experiences, histories, needs, pleasures, structures and boundaries they are interested in engaging with the idea of ‘the untrained’ to propose a space of movement as a form of anarchy.
Low Key wants to lower the stakes of what a performance space might normally hold. The Uncollective are using Sara to lower the stakes of their dance practice. Sara is using the Uncollective to make it okay to be watched while dancing.
FREE
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1ST SEPT: On site 2.45pm / 3.30pm /4.15 pm test the installation and crits; public 6pm to 9pm
Eliza Soroga - Yesterday I was
Yesterday I was, is a durational multi-media participatory performance which creates an open setting for people to have a sit and share their previous day experiences. As a confession room of the future - the work intends to make a comment on social media isolation, where people share their everyday moments by uploading pictures on Instagram or twitting random incidents, in a phenomenally invisible collective sphere.
FREE
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2ND SEPT: Taste 7pm to 10pm Curated with Isabel Blanco-Fernandez
Nora Silva, Finn Thomson & Paloma Proudfoot - Minced Meat
The event will be a four act meal narrating a political fiction about appropriation, destruction and effrontery. Food will be served during the play to illustrate the scenes and contribute to the story telling.
Act 1 - It's the Real Thing - food tree, suits, post-truth
Act 2 - The Bread Auction - bread, auctioneer, butter, wig, bids
Act 3 - Minced Meat - riot, meatballs, splash sauce, ceramics, opera singer
Act 4 - Live Bolder - selfies, minced pies, momentum
*tickets on https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/taste-minced-meat-tickets-36615971356
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3RD SEPT: OVER 50s 4pm to 5.45pm
Andrea Maciel - BE – 2 – IN: Body connectivity
The act of doing an action together involves sensorial cooperation, negotiation of time/space, coordination of forces engaged in a dynamic of mutual trust. It has many possibilities within it as choice, chance, resistance and surrender. Participants over 50s will play with time, space and the energy existing between bodies in the process of doing an action together, working on elements such as body connectivity, sensorial led movement, conscious cooperation, movement awareness and imagination as catalysts for changing motion and behaviour. The session explore the dilatation of usual sensorial abilities behind spontaneous everyday life gestures and from there initiates a series of creative provocations.
FREE: book your place https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/over-50s-be-2-in-body-connectivitytickets-36467748016
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4TH SEPT: Closing Ceremony
FREE
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Check the documentation on www.lostsenses2017.com
LOST SENSES is curated by Linda Rocco and Supported using public funding by The National
Lottery through Arts Council England and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.