Without You I’m Nothing: Humble Beginnings / Alternative Presents

This series of events is born out of a sensibility that we are at the end of the world as we know it: current ecological, political and technological narratives and histories are volatile and unstable. Environmental disasters, future of net neutrality, vanished species and looming nuclear disasters are no longer a part of science fiction writing or a post apocalyptic movie but a part of our reality. The three events investigate the possible ends of an era, its entangled histories, open-ended narratives and flux identities. They aim to carefully glimpse into the possible futures of humankind and otherkind: the vital necessity for co-dependence and urgency to remember, preserve and act now.

The first of the three events, Humble Beginnings / Alternative Presents, takes place on the 28 November and investigates feminist alternatives for contemporary digital culture. Emerging from the rapid changes of technological landscape and its effects on a variety of issues such as identity, gender, power and activism, there is an urgency to create effective methods towards equitable and unbiased society. Hopeful and uncertain, dark yet optimistic, we will ask what are the spaces and places that we need and want right now, and how these spaces can be created and sustained?

The invited participants will examine discourses and ideas around feminist languages, the addictive digital realm and online/offline healing practices. Through radical re-thinking and critical assessment of the on-going narratives, identities and possibilities presented to us, we will share methods and ideas on how to shape the digital and IRL realities and languages into safe and nurturing havens.

Participants

Katriona Beales is a sculptor who also makes moving image, performance and installation, stressing the continuing role of the object in digital life. Her work responds to the experience of slipping between offline and online worlds, information overload, online behavioural addictions, experiences of the technological sublime and notions of a Digital Baroque.

Anna Bunting Branch is an artist and researcher based in London. Moving between different practices – including painting, writing and animation – her research explores science fiction as a methodology to re-vision feminist practice and its histories.  Anna will be in conversation with Carys Afoko from Level Up, a new feminist organisation which officially launched in January 2018.  Level Up’s mission is to build a community of feminists who can work together to end sexism in the UK.  Their vision is a world where everyone is free to achieve their potential regardless of their gender.

Carys Afoko joined Level Up from SumOfUs, where she was global Communications Director. Carys is a former Head of Communications at the New Economics Foundation and a former adviser to Labour MP Lisa Nandy. She co-founded istreetwatch.co.uk to track the rise racist and xenophobic street harassment in the wake of the EU referendum. Carys was recently named one of InStyle magazine’s Future 15. She is a Trustee of the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW).

Rebecca James is an artist, interior designer and curator. Born in Dorset, based in London UK) works with the aesthetic qualities of interior and industrial design, cosmetics and their advertising, natural dyes and pigments. She combines these elements to narrate a personal, sensual and idiosyncratic response to her experience of social codes and environments. She tries to get to the heart of what matters about matter.

The events are organised as a part of a residency titled 6 Months Without by Nastja Säde Rönkkö, where the artist lives and works in London without the Internet for 6 months. The intention of Rönkkö’s slow offline existence and the accompanying events is to actively research, create and test out new ways of connecting, communicating and being in a city, community and the society at the time of major changes in the ways we live, feel and function in the world.

Next event in the series:
Thu 31 Jan 2019

The events and the residency are supported by Somerset House Studios, Wysing Arts Centre, The Finnish Institute in London and Alfred Kordelin Foundation.