Self—Service



Self-Service was a collaborative project with Ilona Sagar for Glasgow International 2018. Taking the form of a publication and event series, the project was developed in response to the archive of The Peckham Experiment—a radical vision for encouraging health, local empowerment, and self-organisation in the first half of the 20th century.
Designed in collaboration with Maeve Redmond, Self-Service brings together newly produced works by myself and Ilona Sagar alongside original texts and works by invited collaborators and contributors;

Emma Balkind | Alberta Whittle | Gary Zhexi Zhang | Clara Crivellaro & Alex Taylor | Luke Frost

Exploring the increasingly uneasy relationship we have to health, wellbeing, and labour, the publication situated new works and responses alongside orignal archival materials.



Cultures



Cultures was a new moving image work and performative reading developed as part of the Self-Service Screening programme for Glasgow International 2018. Drawing on cultural depictions of the ‘technical body’ from skincare advertising to educational children’s cartoons, Cultures considers how we explain our bodies with ideas inherited from elsewhere, questioning tendencies to territorialise and militarise the body in order to articulate health, illness and notions of utility and morality.

You can read the script here

The screening programme also included works by Alberta Whittle, Ilona Sagar, Gary Zhexi Zhang, The Leeds Animation Workshop, Liz Magic Laser, and Julien Prévieux




Lab-oratory


Lab-oratory was the second of two events that was developed as a companion to the Self-Service publication - inspired by a serial publication authored by the members of the Peckham Experiment titled ‘Guinea Pig.’

Through, talks, discussion, and working directly with archival materials, Lab-orartory was an opportunity to collectively generate and create new responses to the original archival materials.

Led by myself and Ilona Sagar the event also featured invited contributions from Dr Elsa Richardson, Anna Clover, and Dr Lisa Curtice that explored questions of voice, agency, and authority in relation to the archive.

The group collaboratively produced a new text and video work through a call and response listening and speaking excercise with excerpts from the archival materials.