Fi lm ic: structuring a film workshop which isn’t just about films.

A little while ago, I made some films for Centred (a charity I have previously referred to as Kairos). The films were the product of a workshop I ran in conjunction with the Soho walking tour the charity runs. On December 11th they had their first public airing at the Centred Winter Warmer, which is a kind of performance / logistics evening in which everyone involved with relevant activities comes and speaks.
I briefly introduced the films, but one of the points I wanted to make, that may have been a little irrelevant given the audience, was that this is the first time I have tried a workshop in which the participants transform a social experience into an artistic one.

Offending Frequencies

So, the latest Poetry Review comes out soon with a cover of my own design. Edited by Bernardine Evaristo. Dec 14th. Look out.

Queer Zine Fest, Dec 8th @ Space Station 65

 

Go. It’s very soon. And fingers crossed, I’ll be messing about with lino.

https://www.facebook.com/lgbtqzinefestlondon

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Diamond Inside: What Diamond?

What happens when artists go into poor neighbourhoods and create art? Gentrification. And also documentaries such as Diamond Inside which I saw as part of Singapore Indie Doc Fest. It’s a documentary by Luis Sanchez Alba about Boamistura, a well-known Spanish art collective who go to Cape Town to paint murals in townships. This is not the first superficial documentary of its kind, but its the first I’ve seen in a while that both highlights and leap-frogs an obvious problem with its subject: while the artists in question are very dedicated to the idea of social good via public art, there is zero strategy for ensuring that the benefits of this art go to the people who live in the area.

I See You

I See You – Exhibition Zine

Click the link above to download the zine I made to accompany the show. Exhibition essay after the jump.

The Exquisite Corpse Satisfies The Third Mind.

“A successful collaboration is always the result of a successful relationship. The paintings are the physical proof of the harmony that existed beyond the canvas.” – Keith Haring on Warhol and Basquiat, Oct 4 1988, NYC.

A few days ago I presented an exhibition of Exquisite Corpses at a warehouse in Melbourne. While travelling in Indonesia, my compadre and I passed the time by playing this game. After a few rounds, we decided we’d make 54 and turn them in to a deck of cards as a souvenir. When we arrived in Melbourne, and it was suggested over the fire that we exhibit everything we’d drawn, we didn’t take it very seriously and, besides, we were sure we’d drawn less than forty. Over the next few days we suddenly remembered, with much amusement, that we were supposed to be completing more in time for “The Exhibition”. On the day, we dragged ourselves from very good company in Edinburgh gardens  an hour before the show was to open, and blu-tacked the corpses to the wall. The gallery space, which was annexed to a very cool warehouse occupied by the sweetest of couples, G and E, was being cleared by the lease-holder who was hoovering with Freddy Mercury-like enthusiasm. Only two curatorial decisions were made – to put the pieces in rough chronological order and on the far wall without any chairs – and within the hour we were cracking open the beers.

Patterns of trade/work

I visited the Patterns of Trade exhibition today. The relationship between poetry and patterns is obvious; the intricacy of some of the designs, their beauty and their unity is what we all try to do with words. I was thinking more about sequential art. I’m currently working on five pieces for an exhibition tentatively called “Graphic Poetry”, and I am playing around with the idea of a comic that is exclusively made of patterns, as well as some Islamic influences on the typography.

Praise be our redundancy?

I’m a bit of a dinosaur. The fact that I am posting this video six months after it was shot proves this. My discomfort with social media means that for the last eight years I have avoided doing much online beyond reading email, blogging in spurts, wasting time on YouTube and scrolling through The Guardian. I have never understood how the internet aids what I do as a writer. It’s an obvious promotion tool, but, so far, it has had little impact on what I actually write. It has been noted that we writers of literary fiction and poetry act as though the internet did not exist, and I think it’s because the   model/medium – pen and paper – is still the same, as is the aim – publication. I am aware that this is evidence of a chronic lack of imagination.

How about not writing anything?

Flicking through various poetry books to find ideas for writing makes for eerily familiar reading. Books such as Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and the Teach Yourself: Poetry book all suggest writing more as a way of dealing with the fact that you haven’t written anything. Very like the commentators who suggest that we should spend more money because, in spending too much, the economy has collapsed, but depends on spending to be revived again. I was reading this article, and thought, what about another solution? Isn’t the drive to be creative too limited to the idea of production?

Zine Workshop / Embrace your inner creep, yo.

I often wonder whether the things I think about are really so strange, niche and eccentric – and the answer, which is a resounding yes, is answered in places like USP where many students look at you in mild amusement when you tell them you write poems for a living. Thankfully, this was not the case this evening. I brought along my (much diminished) collection of zines that I’ve gathered since leaving the UK and we spent nearly three hours cutting shit up, to make a mini-zine of our poems.