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Showing posts from 2017

The Next Text Festival

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On a fairly regular basis I am asked when the next Text Festival will be. My reply is always that the Text happens when there is something for it to investigate. My answer over the last year has also pointed to a European funding bid which if it had been successful would have linked a festival in 2018 with developments in Finland , Italy and Srpska .  So, we were waiting to hear the EU decision. There is still the possibility of funding but either way it feels about time to announce the Text Festival – maybe also triggered by the Random Archive .  Generally, I subscribe to John Peel’s philosophy that the next song is more interesting that the last one.   So, researchers of the Text Festival have been frustrated over the years when trying to study its four manifestations by my mild disinterest in Text Festival nostalgia. Luckily, Susan Lord has over the last few years been working to establish the Text Archive and curated the current Random Archive working with the quite sig

Foreigners

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There's been a spate of museum ‘what-to-do-about-Brexit’ conferences/briefings since the EU referendum - a symptom of the uncertainty which museums (and everyone else) faces at this time. A fundamental problem for museums is that one of the founding values of their purpose, liberal progress, faces its darkest threat since WW2 . A s custodians of history, Museums (should) recognise more than most that we have been here before - rising hate crime, xenophobia, populist nationalism/fascism, and now Trump in the White House adding gangster capitalism and climate change denial. Chinese military officials openly operate on the assumption of the 'practical reality' of Sino-US war and, even since I started writing this, Putin has told the Russian air force to prepare for war. We now know what it felt like in Germany in 1933. The barbarians are at the gate and this time we have no excuse for ignorance – we have the lessons of history. So what will the museums do? There’ll be

Listen Backwards to Advance

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Today Helmut Lemke launched Listen Backwards to Advance (LBtA) in Bury. For the whole of 2017 he will work from the starting point of an archive of all his previous work to move his practice forward.  He has moved everything that has anything to do with his artistic activities into the basement of the Fusilier Museum, opposite the Bury Art Museum – a process of creating a public archive, investigating a 40 year career in sound art as a durational public performance. It examines a European sound art practice through rigorous investigations of past work. This project unpacks one person’s creative practice and collaborations across Europe. LBtA will be performed in two stages – a research and development stage from Jan to June and a second stage where he will follow questions that have been identified in the R&D stage. The R&D and critical investigation will be public for 5.5 months in Bury Art Museum (Jan-17 - June-17) investigating and questioning issues that have determi

Museums, Innovation and Entrepeneurship: Forthcoming Talks

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A busy few weeks of presentations about museums, international working and entrepreneurship (links included below). Breaking Culture Date: 26-28 January Location: the Santa Maria della Scala Museum Complex, Siena, Italy Quite excited about this conference as it frames the discussion in the relation of the future of culture, and unusually locates museums in the dialogue with music and cities.  The title of my paper is ‘How Not To Be National’ in which I’ll be talking about how it is possible to develop an international practice by ignoring your regional or national cultural institutional structures and going straight to global projects and collaboration. In my session I share the platform with Raquel Mesa from Action Cultural in Spain and N2U Art Group Paris. Entrepreneurship in Cultural Heritage Workshop Date: 2 February Location:  Birmingham University. I often hear myself referred to as entrepreneurial, and though never correct it, don’t believe it is a good de

Inauguration of Donald Trump: Sequester the Bile

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Sequester the Bile 1 Will this be filmed? Will I ever been seen again? Déjà vu to pre-empt the desire to say: this is me and that is them - as emphatic modifiers If the signature is left as an empty list A loser’s garden for a nobody, nobodies, useless eaters as a forgetful functor: their intropunitive ignorance of a soliton that goes ahead of us Austere defenders of the right to pay towards the certificate with or without fear. 2 Now conditionally bijective to now A catalogue of comparatives and superlatives been here before those heroes, holders or changes to the governance pathway; recursive choice mildnesses the indecisive bring me the head of stupid enjoy your day of barely disguised resentment, whispered irritation catalogue systems of libraries, ideas cosy, mediocrity built after                 bombing, trees all the same height are the same age in estates of easily constructed isotropic ho