IN·FLO·RES·CENCE composer, artist Elaine Mitchener is joined by filmmaker theorist Kodwo Eshun and art historian curator Temi Odumosu in-conversation with The Showroom Director Elvira Dyangani Ose about experimental vocals and social transformation.
This discussion includes an introduction to IN·FLO·RES·CENCE’s focus on the cross-modality of art and sound and the three guest speakers: artist Elaine Mitchener whose work encompasses improvisation, contemporary music theatre, and performance art; filmmaker and theorist Kodwo Eshun who is a co-founder of The Otolith Group and explores ideas about how music and science fiction intersects with the African diaspora; and art historian and curator Temi Odumosu whose research focuses on the visual politics and archiving of colonialism, and how art mediates social change and healing.
Director Elvira Dyangani Ose, turning towards her curatorial interest in storytelling and the idea of sound as a poetic source of knowledge, moderates this conversation around the idea of jazz as expressed through experimental vocals, movement, and composition; as well as the cross-modalities of sonics, art, performance, social transformation, and healing, which everyone’s individual practices and recent collaborations potently address.
Image: Elaine Mitchener performing Sweet Tooth, St George’s Bloomsbury, 2018. Photos © Brian Roberts
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Learn more about the speakers here:
This hour and a half long conversation delves into Elaine’s collaborative practice with reference to her unique composition for IN·FLO·RES·CENCE blutit; her recent performance at Cafe OTO performing Alvin Lucier’s Bird and Person Dynin; and her seminal piece SWEET TOOTH which premiered in 2017 at Bluecoat Liverpool, UK as was most recently performed in and most recently in 2020 at the Borealis Samtale Festival in Bergen, Norway accompanied by a conversation with Temi.
Please enjoy these references below:
More information about Elaine's performances and talks:
IN·FLO·RES·CENCE composition: blutit
Cafe OTO performance: Bird and Person Dynin
Cross-disciplinary music theatre piece: SWEET TOOTH
In-conversation with Temi Odumosu: Borealis Episode 1
This discussion also reflects deeply upon American composer, pianist, vocalist, and dancer Julius Eastman and Elaine’s collaboration with The Otolith Group in resurrecting his influential legacy. The Third Part of the Third Measure by The Otolith Group (2017) featured a speech by Elaine based on her adapted transcription of Eastman’s Northwestern University statement responded to objections to his composition titles, before his concert on 16 January 1980.
Furthermore, Elaine and Kodwo participated in INVOCATIONS I + II for the WE HAVE DELIVERED OURSELVES FROM THE TONAL – Of, with, towards, on Julius Eastman exhibition at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin (2018) – a symposium focusing on concepts beyond the predominantly Western musicological format of the tonal or harmonic. Further works in Elaine’s performance oeuvre in honour of Eastman include In Search of Julius Eastman by Elaine Mitchener (2016) and Elegy | EASTMAN INVOCATIONS by George E Lewis (2018).
More information about these projects about Julius Eastman:
The Third Part of the Third Measure (2017) by The Otolith Group
WE HAVE DELIVERED OURSELVES FROM THE TONAL – Of, with, towards, on Julius Eastman (2018) Exhibition at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin
In Search of Julius Eastman (2016) by Elaine Mitchener
Elegy | EASTMAN INVOCATIONS (2018) by George E Lewis
Image: The Third Part of the Third Measure, The Otolith Group, 2017. Installation view, Commissioned by ICA Philadelphia and Sharjah Art Foundation. Courtesy of the artists
Finally, this conversation finishes with a reflection on American Pianist and Poet Cecil Taylor, whose ground-breaking experimental practice this platform is in honour of. Indeed, the structure of multiple voices at the core of this project is inspired by an inflorescence: a cluster of flowers arranged on a stem, comprising a complicated arrangement of branches, further referencing the budding of blossoms – the process of flowering, a moment of unfolding, the stage of development full of possibility and production. This anatomical concept is also eponymous with the 1989 avant-garde album by Taylor (1929–2018), whose practice has fused sound and art since the 1950s free jazz and New York loft scene through till this decade with his Open Plan exhibition at The Whitney Museum in 2016.
As reflected in the meaning of this word, Taylor’s experimental ethos, and the political agency of jazz, this project aims to activate the global history of creative cross-pollination between musical and visual art communities through a gathering of voices reflecting upon the conditions of this unique historical moment. Through these participatory and expansive modes of connection, IN·FLO·RES·CENCE will create a constellation – an inflorescent cluster – filled with multiple voices, active listening, a poetic source of knowledge, and a resonant echo of call and response. A space to breathe, listen, create, and connect.
Lockdown Library. Photo: Elaine Mitchener
KODWO ESHUN
Kodwo Eshun is Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, Professor, Haut Ecole d’Art et Design, Genève and co-founder of The Otolith Group. He is co-editor of The Fisher Function, 2017, Post Punk Then and Now, 2016, The Militant Image: A Cine-Geography: Third Text Vol 25 Issue, 2011, Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom, 2010 and The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982–1998, 2007 and author of Dan Graham: Rock My Religion, 2012, and More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, 1998.
His recently published book More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction is part manifesto for a militant posthumanism, part journey through the unacknowledged traditions of diasporic science fiction. It finds the future shock in Afrofuturist sounds from jazz, dub and techno to funk, hip hop and jungle. Theorist and artist Kodwo Eshun opens the possibilities of sonic fiction: the hitherto unexplored intersections between science fiction and organised sound. Situated between electronic music history, media theory, science fiction and Afrodiasporic studies, this book is one of the key works to stake a claim for the generative possibilities of Afrofuturism.
ELAINER MITCHENER
Born and raised in East London of Jamaican heritage Elaine Mitchener is a contemporary vocalist, movement artist and composer, whose work encompasses improvisation, contemporary/experimental music theatre and dance. She has performed and collaborated with numerous leading artists including Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother), Mark Padmore, George E. Lewis, The Otolith Group, Sonia Boyce, Tansy Davies, Hamid Drake, Van Huynh Company, Apartment House, David Toop, London Sinfonietta, Christian Marclay, Ensemble Manufaktur für aktuelle Musik, William Parker. She is founder of collective electroacoustic trio The Rolling Calf with saxophonist Jason Yarde and bassist Neil Charles. Her sound works are held in a curated collection by George E Lewis at Darmstadt Festival.
Photo: Guido Mencari.
TEMI ODUMOSU
Dr. Temi Odumosu is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Malmö University in Sweden. Her international research and cultural practice is concerned with the visual and affective politics of slavery and colonialism, colonial archives and archiving, Afro-Diaspora aesthetics, and more broadly exploring how art mediates social transformation and healing.
Between 2014 and 2017 Temi worked collaboratively with an interdisciplinary team of researchers for the Living Archives Research Project, at Malmö University, which addressed the challenges of producing and working with archival material in an increasingly digitized and networked environment. Under the project’s ‘Performing Memory’ enquiry strand she developed alternative approaches to the representation of colonial archival material, by combining augmented reality (AR), sound, media projection, and varying kinds of performance to develop more affective public experiences with this contested past. She is currently a member of the research project The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories.
Photo: Louise Haywood
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ELVIRA DYANGANI OSE
Elvira Dyangani Ose is Director of The Showroom, London. She is currently affiliated to the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada and Tate Modern Advisory Council. Until November 2018, she served as Creative Time Senior Curator, where she most recently curated their 11th edition of their Summit. She is currently curating the publications of 34th Bienal De São Paulo and is the Curator for the PHotoESPAÑA, International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts.
Dyangani Ose was Curator of the eighth edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary art, (GIBCA 2015) and Curator International Art at Tate Modern (2011 – 2014). Ose has published and lectured on modern and contemporary African art and has contributed to art journals such as Nka and Atlántica. She studied a Doctoral Degree in History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University, New York; has a MAS in Theory and History of Architecture from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona; and a BA in Art History from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Photo: Christina Ebenezer
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