Organised by Somerset House
For the sixth and final event in the series, Studios resident Col Self responds to the provocation, I Should Be Doing Something Else Right Now with a live broadcast.
Tune in to the livestream via this link here
Experimenting with the production and editing tools to hand, six artists live stream a performance from home, responding to the provocation I Should Be Doing Something Else Right Now. A series of quick-fire commissions from Studios artists exploring work, play and process.
The moving image work begins as a rite of passage featuring Stonehenge Winter Solstice and, due to being unable to film on location because of COVID-19, becomes an exploration of the rite of passage more generally, and the internal altered states that a rite provokes. Through this, the artists question what it means to be move through a period which similarly to the rite can be described as an "unknown between two knowns".
Col's work speculates on the possibility of magick and ritual to question what a progressive future might be, away from the rhetoric of the capitalism. Using the products, fashions and symbols of capitalism through the lens of ritual is a form of reclamation in resistance to late neoliberalism, which has always driven utopian models towards platform dynamics of closure.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Col Self is a London-based artist working from the Royal College of Art as a current PhD candidate (LAHP scholarship), and as an artist resident at Somerset House studios. She graduated in media from the Slade UCL (2012), and moving image from the Royal College of Art (2018). With PhD supervisors Dr Ben Cranfield and Tai Shani, she research ritual magick for post-capitalism, asking if subversive counterculture is truly dead within a surveilled neoliberal environment. She embodies the radical figure of the witch in order to think through an alienation from nature via patriarchal, capitalist systems. The work is often collaborative through the collective Sp0re, initiated by Self in 2018. Recent shows include Psychedelic Laughter, Platform Arts Belfast, 2019; The Same Tendency, Summerhall Gallery Edinburgh, 2019; Throbbing Muscles, C. Rockerfeller Center for the Contemporary Arts Dresden, 2018; Fig 1 Limelight, Muddy Yard Gallery London, 2018.