About this Event
Join Squishy Collective member Anastasia (A) Khodyreva (writer, researcher, PhD candidate) around the archive table of Soft Tissue: Feeling-Through Precarious Times for a haptic writing moment - in touch with an ice cube and its many gerunds and stories.
During the session, we will engage with ice, this terrestrial trickster and materially queer body that floats the oceans and cracks rocky landscapes but immediately shapeshifts and escapes under the touch of one’s warm palms.
In Touch With Ice invites to be in literal and figurative touch with an ice cube. Together, we will spend a haptic writerly moment with this crystalline crumble of frozen water and attune to its stories of interconnectedness, queer time, disappearance and escape condensed in it. How does an ice cube sound? And if it does, is its song about destruction or transformation? What does its slippery touch tell about boundaries and agencies of bodies we live?
In Touch With Ice is an exercise in noticing politics happening not only during the street protests and in parliament meetings but under the tips of our fingers. It is an exercise in noticing the politics of touch, our imaginaries of what touch is and does and what it may yet do. It is an exercise in noticing surprising intimacies and entanglements, an “exploration of every possibility, an infinite set of possible ways of self-touching through touching others in all possible ways” as feminist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad might have it.
Useful information about this event:
- All bodies are welcome - please feel free to contact me in confidence if you have any accessibility needs. The gallery is wheelchair accessible.
- The ticket price will go to Medical Aid for Palestine but if this feels unmanageable, please do email me at [email protected] for a free place - no questions asked!
- Metroland Studios and Gallery can be found at: 91 Kilburn Square, London, NW6 6PS Go down the alley next to Argos and you’ll see us across the square. Ring the bell to get in.
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About Your Host
Anastasia (A) Khodyreva is a researcher, theorist, and writer held by artistic ways of knowing. Their practice involves terraqueous curiosities, non-binary world-making, bodying, haptic encounters with shimmery bodies, polaroiding, feeling unsurefooted, co-labour-ation, noticing how brilliant bodies we live are and reading-reading-reading. In their doctoral project, they thought of interstices, critical elsewheres co-bodied with human and non-human others through the spiky thickness of the dominant (Western) world. They lecture in gender studies and feminist environmental humanities—always with arts.
@awaitingbody
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About the exhibition
This event is part of the group exhibition and programme: Soft Tissue: Feeling-through Precarious Times (25th Nov- 10th Dec, Metroland Cultures, London)
As we delve into the dark and chilled months in ever darker and chilling times, we warmly invite you into the squidgy, fuzzy folds of the Squishy Collective.
Step into a circle of sculptures, materials, films, sounds and texts that offer and open up gestures, rituals and ideas for navigating precarious times. Can material be used to metabolise harm? Can physical processes help us sense inner emotional worlds? What constitutes ’safe’ touch’? How can touch be used to rehearse different ways of being and doing? Can a text be tactile…and why should it be?
The Squishy Collective are a research group-circle-coven who formed in April 2021 and have been meeting online ever since, convened by artist and Metroland studio resident Becky Lyon. Comprised of sensuous ecologists, fizzy researchers, haptic writers, mermaid-whisperers, clay-crafters and generative gesturers, together they share methods drawn from art research to explore the intersection of touch, tactility and practices of care as part of a toolkit for navigating precarious times.
Exhibits and invitations will touch on milky motherhood, uncanny bodies, visceral clay, fleshy language, haptic ice and visibilising atmosphere among other subjects and are generously offered by: Abigail Fletcher-Drye, Amanda Rice, Anastasia (A) Khodyreva, Becky Lyon, Catherine Monahon, Eliza Bennett, Georgia Perkins, Natasha Sabatini, Rhona Eve Clews, Rosina Godwin and Kate Langrish-Smith.
Come cosy up with us over a hot tea, leaf through texts, take part in quiet invitations, meditate over tactile films or join a rich and playful programme of activities designed to soften, fizz and feed you. Bookings to the private view are now available - stay tuned for a super-bumper events programme coming soon!
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Metroland Studios, 91 Kilburn Vale, London, United Kingdom
GBP 3.00