In the leadup to Jamboree Sophie and I had been gathering new research and assembling prompts to help our ‘choreography curious’ minds devise some new work with movement, connection and inclination at the centre. At the time we didn’t know what this quite meant but Jamboree gave us the nudge to formulate this into a ‘Walk & Talk’ and test some approaches.
‘Desire Lines and Disorientation’ was weird, uncertain and vulnerable and Theo’s documentation of it was tender and incredibly insightful. Prior to this, we had often ran workshops or encounters or situations but this was the first time someone had written about our work like this – with attention, perception – someone who ‘got it’ musing on the feelings, the invitation, the affect and it had a huge impact on us and how we valued this mode of operating.
After Jamboree we weaved this experience and the kudos from having a ‘write up’ into a Arts Council DYCP proposal – and a whole 6 months of activity unravelled out of our imaginary. To our surprise it was successful and meant that we travelled up to Scotland, visiting a number of autonomous spaces along the way discussing embodied knowledge and how it feels to carve new paths, finally landing at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop for a month-long residency. Here we expanded on this research and developed a set of sculptures for disorienting the body – ‘Sympoetic Tools’ and methods to utilise these with others.
At the end of the year and we were able to take up a residency at METAL Southend and invite dream team Kyla Harris, Serena Morgan and Zuleika Lebow – all artists, writers, performers and experts of embodiment and divergence in various ways to join us and generate new work ‘Guttural Living’ with the tools as speculative props. This work all sprang from sharing research in process at Jamboree and by the end of the year had become a whole constellation of elements spanning film, sculpture, social process and writing. This was the first project we had made of this scale and producing it allowed us to really embrace the way we wanted to make and we were invited to share this at Gallery Frank in early 2019.
https://www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/sophie-chapman-kerri-jefferis-desire-lines-and-disorientation/
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