Eleni Ikon (AUDINT)
10 moments of joy and fugitivity in 2020 /////
10 - Our only live AUDINT gig this year, preaching from a pulpit about the power of the female voice to a club audience at FABRICA Brighton, 30 January
Eleni Ikon and Carolin Schnurrer, photo by M. Beatrice Fazi, FABRICA Brighton
9 - Art school strikes in February. Rising against the neoliberal corporatisation of U.K. higher educationāand the systematic and targeted defunding and slow death of the arts and humanities by the Tory governments.
Banner outside Camberwell College of Arts, 20 February
8 - Last dance of the year at Trauma bar in Berlin, 1 March. āAnd the skies always had little fluffy clouds in them, they were long and clear andā¦ There were lots of stars at night
And, they were beautifulā¦.The most beautiful skies, as a matter of factā
7 - Long table discussion with artist Abbas Zahedi on ways of grieving and lamentation at the South London Gallery, 11 March (in parallel with his brilliant exhibition HOW TO MAKE A HOW FROM A WHY?). A bunch of strangers sat around a table, instantly connected by a collective experience (physical, theoretical, aesthetic or otherwise) of grief, loss, and what it means to lament today.
6 - Composer and producer Antye Greie Ripattiās, aka AGF / poemproducer, launch of REC:on, a new website dedicated to political listening and sound art. The care, responsibility and generosity agee puts in all her global projects and collaborations is an antidote to the self-centredness of the Western world. https://rec-on.org/
Artist portrait image from Cafe Oto website
5 - Students from the MA Visual Communication, Experimental Communication pathway at the RCAāLouise Gholam, Carmo Pinheiro de Melo and Dougal Verinder Gedgeārespond to enforced isolation with ExPort Radio, an experimental radio station building bridges in a post-Brexit, mid-Covid-19 environment. https://www.exportradio.club
Image courtesy of ExPort radio
4 - Black radical theory texts being widely circulated amongst white people. Next should come the realisation that: ā1) all thought, insofar as it is genuine thinking, might best be conceived of as black thought and, consequently, 2) all researches, insofar as they are genuinely critical inquiries, aspire to black studies. Blackness is theory itself, anti-blackness the resistance to theory.ā (Jared Sexton via Lewis Gordon, https://csalateral.org/issue/1/ante-anti-blackness-afterthoughts-sexton/)
3 - Free arts educational talks, workshops, and events streaming during the covid Spring. All the theatre! Something of the ancient Greek idea of catharsis was in the airā¦
Image from The Trojan Women (Euripides) by Terzopoulos, free streaming via the Onassis Foundation, 24 April
2 - The Geeās Bend Quiltmakers. The experimental processes and compositional language of the quilts have been passed down three generations of women living in Geeās Bend, a remote black community situated on a U-turn in the Alabama River.
Image by Konstantinos Panapakidis, Alison Jacques Gallery exhibition, 2 Dec-6 Feb 2021
1 - The exquisite voice, lyricism and musical ability of Coby Sey. Both in his solo and collaborative projects, seeing him live or live stream, an encounter with his music is a rare joyous moment in which my faith in the human race is reinstated. If weāre capable of such beauty and skill, then we deserve to fight and survive the pandemics of covid, racism, and ecological destruction. If only for a momentā¦
Screengrab from live stream performance with Lafawndah x Church of Sound: The Fifth Season, 26 October
