Blow up my town | Amelia Bywater

Blow up my town

Perspectives on self-abolition, the body and transgression.

loom loom loom presents a group/reading/discussion:

hosted by Amelia Bywater, Gesa Helms, Liam Casey

as part of the Studio Projects 2016 Residency at Market Gallery

Sunday 22nd January 2017

5 – 8pm

Market Gallery

334 Duke Street, Glasgow, G31 1QZ

RSVP essential – see below.

Travel and childcare costs refunded. Evening meal provided.

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With selected film-works, poetry and theory that investigates themes of self-abolition, the body and transgression, we would like to open up a discussion exploring differing (and sometimes shared) positions, asking how our human bodies might relate to critique, transformation, or, in fact, the perpetuation of stultifying and compulsive, violent and exploitative social forms.

We’re interested in how the concept of self-abolition – the cessation of a particular historical-materialist subjectivity – can open up a political strategy and practice for our current times: to abolish our situated classed, gendered and racialised selves. Self-abolition pursues the negation of existing social forms by means of a collective subject that abolishes itself in struggle.

Questions for us are: how might these struggles manifest? How can we understand the manifestation of this process? And what are their limitations? For this, we are looking towards aesthetic practices that explore embodied processes of negation, in both presence and absence: six different pieces by Chantal Akerman, Jack Halberstam, Bhanu Kapil, Nathaniel Mackey, Pipilotti Rist and Marina Vishmidt. Some of these present forms and practices of self-abolition, transgression, and embodiment; others make conceptual propositions. We hope this will lead to a discussion through the shared and varied practices of those who join us in the event.

The format will include two short-films, discussions, in different forms, of short texts (circulated in advance) and a break for food.

RSVP: We are asking participants to spend some time with the source materials, if you would like to attend the event, please contact Amelia at loomternet@gmail.com by Tuesday 10th January for her to send out the material. Spaces may be limited.

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‘Blow up my town’ is taken from Chantal Akerman’s first film Saute ma Ville.

Amelia, Gesa and Liam started to collaborate in 2015. Their work revolves around ongoing friendships and shared antagonisms with their labour in art and academic institutions, and concerns that overlap across art, affect, gender and communism.

During the Studio Projects 2016 Residency at Market Gallery, Amelia has developed loom loom loom, a speculative publishing project scoping out the indistinct spaces of writing, speaking and performing and their translation within the actual spaces of art and work. loom loom loom will exist as a series of events focusing on forms of writing that seep out of seemingly sealed off circuits of labour and capital, and carry with them the traces of this movement.