Project Profile

Fictional Reconfigurations

GEORGIA PERKINS OUTLINES A RECENT ONLINE WORKSHOP SERIES WITH ARTIST AMANDA RICE FOR SIRIUS IN CORK.

AS CURATORIAL FELLOW at SIRIUS in Cork, I organised the online workshop series, ‘Fictional Reconfigurations (& Embodied Transformations)’, with artist-researcher Amanda Rice. The series ran from February to April and examined the linguistic prefix ‘re’ and its uses in forms of resistance to contemporary urgencies – geopolitical unrest, climate instability, financial struggles – by posing practical alternatives to violent and inefficacious structures. The workshops were delivered by artists Nina Davies, Jo Pester and Becky Lyon, using aspects of fiction and embodiment to rehearse dances, re-body earthly curriculums, and reconfigure interspecies communication, to speculate on ways of living otherwise.

The SIRIUS online events programme aims to contribute to current critical debate. The first series I organised in spring 2020 was a performative reading group with the artist Ofri Cnaani called the ‘Dizzying Feeling of Touch’, looking at the role of hapticity in an increasingly contactless world in the context of the global pandemic. For the second series in 2021, titled ‘Post-Pandemic, Post-Crisis… Under What Terms?’, we collectively read theoretical texts by Paul B. Preciado, Bruno Latour, and Achille Mbembe, which examine potential conditions for a reimagined future.

The latest workshop series, ‘Fictional Reconfigurations (& Embodied Transformations)’, culminates from my ongoing collaboration with Rice and our shared research interests in more-than-human intelligence and speculative fiction. It builds on the multiple exhibition and residency projects that we have worked on over the last four years. Rice’s forthcoming show at SIRIUS (27 May – 1 July) will present her new work, The Flesh of Language (2023).

Nina Davies hosted the first workshop, ‘Fictional Dance’, on 22 February. Davies discussed the four pillars of dance – spiritual, agricultural, war and fertility – which form the basis of her current research into how historic and contemporary traditional dances operate in society today. She shared a screening of her film, Stepping into Machine (2022), which reimagines a con-

temporary popular dance as a traditional spiritual dance of the future. Davies discussed her recent work (shown at Transmediale, Berlin, and Seventeen Gallery, London) as well as her bi-monthly talk show, ‘Future Artefacts’ with Niamh Schmidtke, featuring speculative fiction audio works by artists that take the form of fictional interviews and radio plays.

On 15 March, Jo Pester delivered the second event, ‘The Shape of Words/Worlds – Bodied Communication in Alien Landscapes’. In the workshop, Pester discussed the history of humans sending messages into outer space in the hope of reaching extra-terrestrial intelligence and pointed to fictionalised examples such as Ted Chiang’s novella, Story of Your Life (Tor, 1998). She finished the session by encouraging participants to imagine and describe their own ‘alien landscape’ and to construct a fictional species by imagining other forms of communication. This could be based on ‘real’ methods of exchange, such as visual and chemical signalling, or by producing an entirely new form of interaction.

Becky Lyon facilitated the final event, called ‘Breaking Spells, Spell-ing Worlds to Come’, on 26 April. She discussed how language casts spells and encodes modes of relation. In addition, she considered how ecology acts as an alternative curriculum. She gave examples of the relationship between wording and worlding by discussing a publication by by Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass (Bloomsbury Circus, 2020), which looks at how terms like ‘private property’ can alter how we behave, inhabit and navigate a place. Lyon invited participants to respond to various word-play exercises in order to implement their own word-worlding power. The workshop series provided a rich discussion on how uses of fiction shape and choreograph worlds through imaginary and alternative gestures, spells, and other modes of sensorial and sonic communication.

Georgia Perkins is a researcher and curatorial fellow at SIRIUS. georgiaperkins.co.uk siriusartscentre.ie

Nina Davies, Input Chamber, 2022; image courtesy of artist.

Remaking the Crust of the Earth

GAVIN MURPHY DISCUSSES HIS RECENT PROJECT EXHIBITED AT THE IRISH ARCHITECTURAL ARCHIVE.

Gavin Murphy, Remaking the Crust of the Earth 2023, installation view, Irish Architectural Archive; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist.

“The material of which we speak is almost the stuff of magic. By an accident of nature molten silicon (the most common material in the earth’s crust), when cooled carefully, instead of becoming a crystalline and opaque material, remains molecularly amorphous and transparent to the visible spectrum of radiation that reaches us from the sun, to which our eyes are attuned… If we were to wish such a material into existence we might well give up at the apparent impossibility of it.” 1

THE ABOVE QUOTE, a fragment from a longer text, is one of many extracts that I stitched together with lines from other texts, written perhaps decades prior, in an act of assemblage – a physical, sculptural, concrete reassembling of words for a new purpose. This direct lifting was purposeful, while retaining anachronistic language styles was materially and temporally important.

The entire project was rooted in a chance encounter during a visit to one of the ‘stores’ on the NCAD campus, the place where those books not readily available on the library shelves go – some to be forgotten, possibly to be deaccessioned, gems hidden among old copies of Art in America and random DVDs. Turning around, I chanced upon a literal ‘stack’, dust laden, barely a borrower’s stamp on the inner page – a selection of lovely, overlooked books about glass.

Elsewhere, in the library’s main collection, was the encyclopedic 1960 edition of Glass in Architecture and Decoration by Raymond McGrath & A.C. Frost. This book was to become a key research tool, but also provided a central visual motif for the subsequent work, and a narrative thread by way of its primary author. Born in Australia of Irish descent, McGrath was among the pioneering architects in 1930s England, preeminent in the use of glass, light and colour. The Second World War saw him move to Dublin, where he became OPW Principal Architect, and designed a building familiar to us all in the Irish art world – the RHA Gallagher Gallery.

This project – which amounted to sev-

eral years of research into the history and cultural impact of glass – culminated recently in an exhibition comprising a film, installed and photographic works at the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA), which also houses McGrath’s documents, drawings, correspondence, and other materials. Over ten years after shooting part of my film, Something New Under the Sun (2012), in the IAA’s reading room, the archive gallery provided the perfect ‘coda’ (or loop) to a body of work concerning time, the built environment, and how we view the world. The involvement of the IAA added a whole new aspect to the project, both in terms of enthusiasm, support, and in allowing me to select from the McGrath Collection to curate a show within a show.

I was fortunate to work closely with exceptional collaborators including Karl Burke, Louis Haugh, Michael Kelly, Oran Day, Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll, and Chris Fite-Wassilak. NIVAL and NCAD Library were ever helpful, allowing repeated access to the ‘stack’, much of which appeared in the film. Support from IADT allowed me access to the National Film School’s incredible studio, with the invaluable help of staff and several students on the production. The project was made possible through initial funding from DLR Arts Office, and subsequently The Arts Council, to produce the film, exhibition, and a school workshop series, devised by artist Marian Balfe. An accompanying publication was published by Set Margins’, Eindhoven.

Gavin Murphy is an artist and curator based in Dublin. gavinmurphy.info

‘Remaking the Crust of the Earth’ ran at the Irish Architectural Archive from 16 March to 28 April 2023. iarc.ie

1 Michael Wigginton, ‘An instrument for distant vision’, in Louise Taylor and Andrew Lockhart (Eds.), Glass, Light & Space: New Proposals for the Use of Glass in Architecture (London: Crafts Council, 1997)