Events – Page 9 – Project DIVFUSE

flu – flue – flew: Matt Harding [PAST]

Performances:

7 October 2023 Saturday 6pm [CANCELLED] [Changed to 15 October 2023 Sunday 6pm]

8 October 2023 Sunday 6pm [CANCELLED] [Changed to 15 October 2023 Sunday 6pm]

15 October 2023 Sunday 6pm

£5 | 10 places only per session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets

Two performances and dialogues between seemingly disparate objects and materials, exploring potential and illusory connections . These collections of small sequences and actions use sound, gesture, synchronicity, mark making and projection to create their own expressive language and suggest hidden narratives and structures.

Materials – Projection – speakers – tennis ball – coin -chalk- metronome – gloves

Using high pitch frequencies along with movement and gesture, these improvisational performances will explore the physicality and musicality of high pitch resonant tones. Integrating recorded and live elements with hand, body and gesture to manipulate and shape the signal.

Performed initially as part of Perpetual Possibility at Iklectik Arts Lab this next series of performances will continue to explore aspects of physicality, duration, musicality and collaboration

Matt Harding is a musician and artist whose work explores movement, texture and repetition. He has released several albums, scored films and live soundtracks. His audio visual pieces include performative installations and an ongoing series of sound films. He has exhibited and performed at The Freud museum, Cafe Oto, Margate and Ramsgate Festivals, Radiophrenia, Klingt Gut, Hackney Wkd, and The Serpentine Gallery amongst others. He also runs the sound and art platform The Thames Submarine.

Mattharding.co.uk

Image by Matt Harding

Unthread : Mute Frequencies [PAST]

Performances:

18 November 2023 Saturday

Session One : 3pm

Session Two : 5pm

£5 | 8 places only per session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets

Mute Frequencies presents two performances of a work in progress. Unthread is the chance meeting of a sewing machine and contact microphones on a dissecting table. The machine’s sounds are extracted for their rhythmic potential and further augmented by a bank of effects. While the ritualistic gesture of threading and operating the machine raises questions about fast fashion, domesticity and gendered work, the sounds themselves are thrown into focus to reveal the inner life of the mechanism.

Each performance will last approximately 20 minutes. Followed by Q&A.

Mute Frequencies is the sound art project of Ilia Rogatchevski and Laura Rogatchevskaia, both former members of the London post-punk band Sebastian Melmoth. The duo work within the intersections of sound, performance and visual media. They have installed work at various London galleries and performed at festivals including Radio Revolten, Supernormal and Open House. Svalbard Soundtracks, their film score project that premiered at DIVFUSE in 2022, is released by Flaming Pines.

Photo by Jonathan Crabb. Live at TACO! August 2023

Listening and Improvisation : Caroline Kraabel [PAST]

Talk :

27 January 2024 Saturday 2-3:30pm

£5 | 12 places only | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets

A talk by experienced improviser Caroline Kraabel

Exploring her own practice, along with a wider view of improvisation and identity: even the world of freely improvised music can be experienced as an enclave that excludes, despite the perceived association of improvisation with limitlessness and freedom.

How do people who improvise feel and think DIFFERENTLY from each other on the subject? How do we avoid or alter any dominance of particular groups over the theory or practice of improvisation? Does the experimental nature of improvisation make it easier for members of élites to shine in the field, because they have more pre-existing socio-cultural capital? Or, does improvisation come more easily for outsiders who are already primed to find alternative paths? How are improvisers affected by their musical and cultural histories? How does a group, maybe a large group, of improvisers negotiate space and time, noise and silence in a musical and just way?

For improvisers who have experienced forms of oppression in music making and/or life, is the aim when making music merely to recapitulate existing power structures, but try to place themselves at the top? Or to create new and fairer structures?

References: Gittin’ To Know Y’all: Improvised Music, Interculturalism, and the Racial Imagination, by George E. Lewis, Columbia University

Naked Intimacy: Eroticism, Improvisation, and Gender, by Ellen Waterman, University of Guelph

https://www.criticalimprov.com/index.php/csieci/article/view/845/1396

Caroline Kraabel is a London-based improviser, saxophonist, artist, conductor, and composer.

In 2022 Kraabel founded a large improvising group made up of all sorts of women, non-binary, and transgender improvisers: ONe_Orchestra New. (https://oneorchestranew.com/)

Colour Sketches : Guy Sherwin [PAST]

Film Installation Exhibition:

16 February 2024 Friday 5 – 7pm

17 & 18 February Saturday & Sunday 2:30 – 5:30pm

Suggested Donations : £2

Artist’s Talk:

Session One : 16 February 2024 Friday 7 – 8pm

Session Two : 17 February Saturday 5:30 – 6:30pm

Session Three : 18 February Sunday 5:30 – 6:30pm (Full)

£5 | 8 places only per session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets

‘I first studied painting and was drawn into film by the possibilities of visual movement.

This show is a chance to develop ideas that began in those student days when I was projecting rhythmic frames of pure colour film onto paintings, and watching the shapes dance about. The DIVFUSE project space will become my first three dimensional canvas on which to try out ideas of colour light on painted surfaces.’ – Guy Sherwin

For the talk, the artist is going to project the original standard 8 film, using a standard 8 projector, onto some of his sketchbooks made in 1970 which were the start of his experiments in colour and film. He will then talk through his journey of arriving to the work that is being displayed today.

‘I have been making films since the early 1970s and these have taken various forms: silent black and white series (Short Film Series); projection onto special screens (Paper Landscape); longer form films (Messages); multi-projection performances with visual sound (Vowels & Consonants – made with Lynn Loo); looped installations (Three Trees).

What links these diverse approaches is the impulse to find out what happens when a new idea is tried out. It’s the process itself that largely determines the direction the work takes.’

Photo from Guy Sherwin

Conversations 2024 : Lynn Loo [PAST]

Film Screening

Session One : 23 February 2024 Friday 6:30pm

Session Two : 24 February Saturday 4pm

Session Three : 24 February Saturday 5:30pm

Session Four : 25 February Sunday 3pm

Session Five : 25 February Sunday 4:30pm

£5 | 8 places only per session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets

Running Time : approximately 25 minutes plus discussion with artist about the work

Conversations 2024

A collection of personal moving images and sounds woven together in digital video, with the intention of some kind of non-sense narrative. An attempt to find connections, distortions, patterns, plot, rhythms, cycle, rambling, pulse, unhinged. Conversations series is an ongoing project.

Originally from Singapore, Lynn Loo has been based in London since 2004. She began making films in 1997. Her works include single-screen to multi-projection and installations. She has participated internationally in festivals, galleries and institutes such as Yebisu International Arts Festival in Tokyo, 59th Ann Arbor Film Festival in USA, Art Central Hong Kong, Tate gallery and Cafe Oto in London.

www.dewfields.co.uk

Photo by Lynn Loo

Prehensile Pow Wow : Monika Tobel [PAST]

Screening & Performance

Session One : 22 March 2024 Friday 6:30pm

Session Two : 23 March Saturday 4pm

Session Three : 23 March Saturday 5:30pm

Session Four : 24 March Sunday 4pm

Session Five : 24 March Sunday 5:30pm

£5 | 8 places only each session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets

Running Time : approximately 21 minutes plus 25 minutes performance and discussions

Exercise in Conscious Listening: Maple, 2021

Film. Running time: 10:26

‘Maple is the third instalment in the Conscious Listening series. The performance took place in Tottenham Park Cemetery as part the of Be-coming Tree International Performance Event. These exercises bring attention to the importance of listening and communication in order to un-learn built-in hierarchical modes of relating, and to build a more harmonious relationship with other species. Using non-lingual communication methods, such as touch, sound, and movement, I attempt to tap into the tree’s communication system. Trees use vibrations in their roots in order to send and receive messages through a fungal network linking them underground, by using my voice and limbs, I hope to create vibration patterns that allow me to tap into this wonderful system. The audio is a representation of the conversation which took place during the performance, using manipulated field recordings and vocals.’

2. Infinite Breath, 2022

Film. Running time: 9:37

Infinite Breath is a meditation on the role of the atmosphere within human and other-than-human connections through time and space. The artist wearing her listening device attempts to respond to the sounds and airflow using movement as a communication tool.

It is through the atmosphere, through the act of breathing that we are connected to all things, past, present, and future. Since the dawn of the planet the atmosphere has been a space of circulation for all elements, forms, and beings, “the metaphysical space of their conjunction, the unity of all things, measured by the coincidence of breath.” Coccia (2019)