Ambiguous Utopia
Northern Charter
Newcastle upon Tyne
26 May 2016
With Gayle Meikle and Simon Raven
Imagine a land terracotta red. Its mountainous landscape littered with outmoded data search tool devices that once helped NASA collate images of planets within our solar system. These shards of cobalt blue and washed-out yellow hover in the distance. In the foreground lies a hexagonal structure comprised of nineteen individual plates. The design appears to form a map depicting land and sea. Upon the platform, three figures stand towards one another repeating an incantation whispered in the ancient language of Eros whilst in the deathly shadows Thanatos awaits.
Ambiguous Utopia at Northern Charter on Friday 26 May was an evening of erotic fabulation comprised by Gayle Meikle, Ross Hamilton Frew and Simon Raven. A one-off performance and exhibition. This event intertwined our independent practice and research into the areas of Sci-fi and utopias, directly referencing Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
Gayle Meikle is an artist, curator and PhD researcher at Northumbria University currently exploring Eros and how this might underpin a curatorial positioning. Ross Hamilton Frew is an artist who works with drawing, ceramics, collage and assemblage. Simon Raven is an artist and PhD researcher at Northumbria University who is exploring disability art through performance.
Northern Charter
Newcastle upon Tyne
26 May 2016
With Gayle Meikle and Simon Raven
Imagine a land terracotta red. Its mountainous landscape littered with outmoded data search tool devices that once helped NASA collate images of planets within our solar system. These shards of cobalt blue and washed-out yellow hover in the distance. In the foreground lies a hexagonal structure comprised of nineteen individual plates. The design appears to form a map depicting land and sea. Upon the platform, three figures stand towards one another repeating an incantation whispered in the ancient language of Eros whilst in the deathly shadows Thanatos awaits.
Ambiguous Utopia at Northern Charter on Friday 26 May was an evening of erotic fabulation comprised by Gayle Meikle, Ross Hamilton Frew and Simon Raven. A one-off performance and exhibition. This event intertwined our independent practice and research into the areas of Sci-fi and utopias, directly referencing Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
Gayle Meikle is an artist, curator and PhD researcher at Northumbria University currently exploring Eros and how this might underpin a curatorial positioning. Ross Hamilton Frew is an artist who works with drawing, ceramics, collage and assemblage. Simon Raven is an artist and PhD researcher at Northumbria University who is exploring disability art through performance.
Text by Gayle Meikle
Movement#1: Hands
These caring hands caress the curriculum.
The curriculum of farming, aesthetics, carpentry, criticality, sewage, reclamation, road mending, craft, drawing, editing, networking, drinking, eating, talking.
These hands link the now to the past to the future through the communion of objects and the making of things.
They are the custodian of things. The holding of things.
Our hands touch. You touch.
My hands when outstretched are puffy, lined and veined. With signs of atopic eczema flaking upon the palms. My right thumb rotates to reveal scars of small burns abundant on its surface. A ‘V’ shaped scratch is risen, crooked but healing. My knuckles bulge and naturally curve. Arthritis will of course come.
These hands are working hands. Not useless work that darkens the heart. But the delight of the scholar, of the good cook or the skilful maker.
Group work is the best form of work. One in which the social body is oiled, tended to and enriched. To learn from one another is to be bathed in the warm glow, to melt from joy. The caress of knowledge is as gentle and nurturing as a mother’s breast or the fluttering sensation of a lover’s embrace.
What did they mean when they said knowledge? Their understanding was purely professional of course.
But now useless work prevails streaked from years of industrial dirt hanging in the air. Billionaire’s wealth has doubled yet overall wages stagnate. There is a will but not a way. They say worklessness leaves you in poverty. Yet it is a deindustrialisation, deinvestment and deskilling that does. The life route for men is education then employment. For women it could be education then employment or marriage then motherhood – but not for he?
Saddle yourself with £27,000 in debt then jump into the gig economy, be your own boss, choose your own hours.
Lose your rights.
Conform to homogeneity in your precarity.
We know that there is no help for us but from one another. That no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is.
This view reveals more of the essence of what should come, a desire to work together in pleasure not toil.
People learned to speak, hear, move and handle with these caring hand.
Movement#2: Body
We are, I am performing a rite
To be in public with everyone else
A slowing of time to dirty our grubby hands
To stand in the margins and shout.
WE BELONG.
But we reject your positioning
Instead we turn away from each other and bend backwards
Bringing together our bodies into this process of other worlding.
YES to the technological body.
YES to the relational body.
But, in this here and now
can we disembody from the gendered body?
For civilization is mainly the work of Eros.
Movement#3: Action
This section is action – led with no dialogue
Cues:
Eros is Assembly
Eros is Perverse
Eros is Pleasure
Movement#1: Hands
These caring hands caress the curriculum.
The curriculum of farming, aesthetics, carpentry, criticality, sewage, reclamation, road mending, craft, drawing, editing, networking, drinking, eating, talking.
These hands link the now to the past to the future through the communion of objects and the making of things.
They are the custodian of things. The holding of things.
Our hands touch. You touch.
My hands when outstretched are puffy, lined and veined. With signs of atopic eczema flaking upon the palms. My right thumb rotates to reveal scars of small burns abundant on its surface. A ‘V’ shaped scratch is risen, crooked but healing. My knuckles bulge and naturally curve. Arthritis will of course come.
These hands are working hands. Not useless work that darkens the heart. But the delight of the scholar, of the good cook or the skilful maker.
Group work is the best form of work. One in which the social body is oiled, tended to and enriched. To learn from one another is to be bathed in the warm glow, to melt from joy. The caress of knowledge is as gentle and nurturing as a mother’s breast or the fluttering sensation of a lover’s embrace.
What did they mean when they said knowledge? Their understanding was purely professional of course.
But now useless work prevails streaked from years of industrial dirt hanging in the air. Billionaire’s wealth has doubled yet overall wages stagnate. There is a will but not a way. They say worklessness leaves you in poverty. Yet it is a deindustrialisation, deinvestment and deskilling that does. The life route for men is education then employment. For women it could be education then employment or marriage then motherhood – but not for he?
Saddle yourself with £27,000 in debt then jump into the gig economy, be your own boss, choose your own hours.
Lose your rights.
Conform to homogeneity in your precarity.
We know that there is no help for us but from one another. That no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is.
This view reveals more of the essence of what should come, a desire to work together in pleasure not toil.
People learned to speak, hear, move and handle with these caring hand.
Movement#2: Body
We are, I am performing a rite
To be in public with everyone else
A slowing of time to dirty our grubby hands
To stand in the margins and shout.
WE BELONG.
But we reject your positioning
Instead we turn away from each other and bend backwards
Bringing together our bodies into this process of other worlding.
YES to the technological body.
YES to the relational body.
But, in this here and now
can we disembody from the gendered body?
For civilization is mainly the work of Eros.
Movement#3: Action
This section is action – led with no dialogue
Cues:
Eros is Assembly
Eros is Perverse
Eros is Pleasure