performingbordersLIVE20 and Live Art Development Agency presented a performance of RE:seeding, in correspondence Performance to Camera by Jade Montserrat livestreamed on the global, commons-based, peer-produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Friday 23 October 2020 at 2 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC-4) / 7 p.m. BST (London, UTC+1) / 20:00 CEST (UTC+2).
RE:seeding, in correspondence is a new performance to camera suggesting that there is a connection between ourselves and the earth and that this line, or connection, like our communications with one another, is drawing.
Developed with film-makers Webb-Ellis, Jade seeks to visualize these exchanges of energy, the lines, the communications, and with that, consider, maybe on a global scale, stewarding of our spaces.
RE:seeding, in correspondence documents processes of making virtual connections with a local community of people who have refugee status or are seeking asylum. Jade’s research topics on ownership, body and land, explored through a workshop with participants from MAFWA Theatre—an organisation in Leeds who make theatre with sanctuary seekers in Burmantofts, Lincoln Green and Mabgate—included an exchange of materials: charcoal, a sketchbook, herb seeds and materials to grow them in with the intention of locating commonality through shared connection to earth, soil, and growth.
A development of "Drawing as Contagion", a text and workshop devised in response to exhibition Instituting Care (Bluecoat; Humber Street Gallery) RE:seeding, in correspondence extends Jade’s central idea that drawing is a mode of being or a mode of operating, allowing further exploration of the question: What does it mean to survey and reclaim "environments", our relationship to space, and where are potentials for reclamation or belongings?
Performance to Camera Collage by Jade Montserrat and Webb-Ellis
Engagement and Project Management by Helen Moore
The online screening will be followed by a conversation between Jade Montserrat and Chandra Frank and a Q&A.
Commissioned by performingborders, East Street Arts, and Counterpoint Arts for performingbordersLIVE20. Supported by Live Art Development Agency, with funding from Arts Council England.
Bios
Jade Montserrat is an artist based in Scarborough, England. She is the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship which supports her PhD (via MPhil) at IBAR, UCLan, and the development of her work from her black diasporic perspective in the North of England. Jade works through performance, drawing, painting, film, installation, sculpture, print and text. Jade Montserrat is the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship which supports her PhD (via MPhil) at IBAR, UCLan, (Race and Representation in Northern Britain in the context of the Black Atlantic: A Creative Practice Project) and the development of her work from her black diasporic perspective in the North of England. She was also awarded one of two Jerwood Student Drawing Prizes in 2017 for No Need for Clothing, a documentary photograph of a drawing installation at Cooper Gallery DJCAD by Jacquetta Clark. Jade’s Rainbow Tribe project – a combination of historical and contemporary manifestations of Black Culture from the perspective of the Black Diaspora is central to the ways she is producing a body of work, including No Need For Clothing and its iterations, as well as her performance work Revue. Jade was commissioned to present Revue as a 24 hour live performance at SPILL Festival of Performance, October 2018, a solo exhibition at The Bluecoat, Liverpool, (Nov – 10 Mar 2019) which toured to Humber Street Gallery ( July-sept 2019) and was commissioned by Art on the Underground to create the 2018 Winter Night Tube cover. Iniva and Manchester Art Gallery have commissioned Jade as the first artist for the Future Collect project (2020).
Chandra Frank is a feminist researcher and independent curator who works on the intersections of archives, waterways, gender, sexuality and race. Her curatorial practice explores the politics of care, experimental forms of narration, and the colonial grammar embedded within display and exhibition arrangements. Chandra earned a PhD in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and exhibition catalogues, including Feminist Review, the Small Axe VLOSA catalogue, The Place is Here publication and the collection Tongues. She recently co-edited a special issue on Archives for Feminist Review. Her curated exhibitions include Re(as)sistingNarratives (Amsterdam/Cape Town), Fugitive Desires(London), and Proclamation 73 (Durban) (co-curated with Zara Julius). Chandra curated the 2016 Archives Matter Conference at the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths. Currently, Chandra is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Charles Phelps Taft Research Centre at the University of Cincinnati.
Caitlin and Andrew Webb-Ellis are British/Canadian artist filmmakers. They use film, dance, music and installation to create work which offers ways to imaginatively access the sensual, primal and interior. Through an extended process of gathering and sifting, they bring diverse materials and concepts into dialogue to create new meaning. Coincidence and fiction play a significant role, and the subject matter is never fixed. Webb-Ellis have ongoing collaborations with artists, scientists, philosophers, family, friends and strangers. Addressing the political through the lens of the subconscious and the body, they explore human loneliness and how we live together. Webb-Ellis are facilitators of Philosophy for Children and recipients of the Jerwood Film and Video Umbrella Award 2019. They are currently working with Cement Fields on an extended educational project and new film funded by Paul Hamlyn Foundation. They live and work from a converted removal truck, continually moving from place to place.
Featured image credits: Screen shot courtesy of Jade Montserrat.
performingborders is a curatorial research-platform that explores the relations between Live Art and notions and lived experiences of cultural, juridical, racial, gendered, class, physical, economic, and everyday borders. Co-run by Alessandra Cianetti and Xavier de Sousa, performingborders hosts monthly interviews and guest posts, and series of related events and artist commissions under the banner of performingbordersLIVE which interrogate the practices of international performers that are responding to challenging notions of contemporary borders with their proliferating and increasingly heterogeneous natures and pervasive presence. Website.
performingbordersLIVE20 (March – November 2020) is a public programme of open calls, artist digital commissions, residencies, workshops, open conversations, and events, focusing on the exploration of experimental and exciting artistic practices happening within the UK Live Art sector around notions and lived experiences of physical, cultural, juridical, racial, gendered, class, and everyday borders. Curated by Xavier de Sousa and Alessandra Cianetti. Presented by performingborders and Foreign Actions Productions in partnership with Counterpoints Arts (London), Live Art Development Agency (London), Contact (Manchester), East Street Arts (Leeds), MAFWA Theatre (Leeds), The Albany/Deptford Lounge (London), Something Human/Asia-Art-Activism (London), Never Done (London), Ọ̀RỌ̀ ÀNÍKÉ (London), Queer Art Projects (London), East London Cable (London), Green Rooms Hotel (London), HowlRound Theatre Commons (Boston, US), Warehouse9 (Copenhagen, Denmark). Supported by Arts Council England. Website.
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