Teaming up with LCMF 2018, the Serpentine Galleries present the second instalment of their year-long ecological symposium and research project. Part of the gallery’s General Ecology project, this day of talks, performances and music will feature anthropologists, artists, robotics experts, historians and more, to address interior multitude, swarming organisms, entanglements, pregnancies, endosymbiosis, microchimerism and metamorphosis — across vegetal, human, artificial, non-human animal and mineral beings

Participants include: artist Sophia Al-Maria, swarm robotics engineer Sabine Hauert, science historian and writer Daisy Hildyard, neuroscientist Leah Kelly, science sociologist Hannah Landecker, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, anthropologist Germain Meulemans, biological systems scientist and network architect Phoebe Tickell, artist Jenna Sutela, composer and sound artist Annea Lockwood and more.

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish is curated by writer and editor Filipa Ramos and Lucia Pietroiusti, Curator (General Ecology), Serpentine Galleries. Advisors include artist Pierre Huyghe, anthropologist Tim Ingold, LCMF artistic director Igor Toronyi-Lalic, artist Katharine Vega and Serpentine CTO Ben Vickers. 

Alongside the main programme, we are teaming up with Walmer Yard in Notting Hill to present a series of lunchtime talks, workshops and site-specific performances with various artists involved in LCMF 2018.

Walmer Yard forms a set of four interlocking houses totalling over 9,000 square feet, set around an open courtyard. This new building, designed and crafted by Peter Salter and developed by Crispin Kelly, is the product of a decade of learning, thought and inspiration.

Walmer Yard is the focus of the Baylight Foundation, a registered charity, with the aim of increasing the public understanding of what architecture can do.

The houses and courtyard engage our sense of touch, smell, sight and sound. They also encourage sharing. It is these experiences which the Foundation will demonstrate, document and explore.

HQ: (I feel so Mezzaniney) (2018) is a collaboration between artist & musician Steven Warwick and dancer/choreographer Carlos María Romero, developed at the FUGA residency in Zaragoza earlier this year. This performance is the latest mutation of Warwick's ‘Mezzanine’ performance series, each of which responds to the architecture in which it is performed, in conjunction here and previously with Romero's choreographic practice.

Dancers (Las Mezzaninas) are maids-in-waiting, performing labour and acting out the conflicts found in, and on, platform-capitalism, where self-care routines and community-building are monetised and gaslighting fragments trust. Sound is dissected and reduced to the minimal rhythms found on runways and in queer club spaces.

If go-go is a dance form that often objectifies the body into a spectacle to be gazed at by the voyeur, in this fictive HQ the body’s pose becomes ambient; less spectacle, more part of the furniture. Warwick and Romero deliberately inhabit the co-working space of Second Home as an ecology where bodies and sound are temporal sculptures. Reflecting upon contemporary feelings of isolation, they posit questions of agency and conspicuous displays of social interactions in an age of unsettling populism.

Over the last ten years, choral collective Musarc has developed a distinct practice of re-assembling traditional choral material through a series of interventions that range from manipulating the original score, instrumentation or lyrics to broader rearrangements. These collages sometimes take in activities on the periphery of the performance space, such as cooking and eating together, and cross the lines between music and other artforms, or the stage and the space of audience.
For Musarc’s Winter Konsert at LCMF 2018, the ensemble has invited composers Steve Potter, Ashley Paul, Sylvia Lim and Georgia Rodgers to re-interpret works by Dieterich Buxtehude, Johannes Brahms and Arnold Schoenberg around a central piece that sees composer/performer Jenny Moore and the choir mash up Purcell’s ’See, we assemble’ and ‘Hither, this way’ from King Arthur with a 1930s protest song by Florence Reece.
The palindromic programme is held together by a libretto written by poet Edwina Attlee in collaboration with the group’s artistic director Joseph Kohlmaier, and book-ended by a performance of Claudia Molitor and Joseph Kohlmaier’s Die Gedanken sind Frei, a piece first performed at Odrathek in May 2018 which sees the ensemble using spades and brooms to shift a ton of earth across the venue — ‘unsettling what preceded and follows it and burrowing through the performance space … Aligning purposeful actions and seemingly purposeless design, it conjures something formidable and cosmic.’ (Sam Mackay, The Wire).
Musarc’s See, We Assemble programme is a collaboration between the artists, members of the ensemble, its director of music Cathy Heller Jones and artistic director Joseph Kohlmaier.