Interview: Artist & Choreographer SERAFINE1369, curator of forthcoming Performance Salon ‘I’ve been looking for things that last’
Shoreditch Town Hall will play host to a one-of-a-kind performance salon – I’ve been looking for things that last – on 25th October, and we caught up with curator Jamila Johnson-Small (aka artist/choreographer SERAFINE1369) to talk about curation, inspiration, sensation and the future of live art.
Don’t miss this one-night-only event featuring four incredible performance and dance pieces from UK and international artists including Adam Christensen, keyon gaskin, Florence Peake and SERAFINE1369 with Steph McMann and Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome.
I’ve been looking for things that last | Shoreditch Town Hall | 25 October | From £8
Hi Jamila, thanks for chatting with us! Can you give us some insight into how you approached curating ‘I’ve been looking for things that last’?
I had been feeling a little over performance at the time when Katy (Baird, from Home Live Art) approached me about doing this event. She was thinking about the themes of cycles and time in my work and we were thinking about ways that the evening could embody this sense of cycling, returns and non-linearity. My most recent work ‘The Ways, the Fortune, the Fall’ we perform three times in a row, looping and returning and it felt like it made sense for this work set the scene for the event. Especially as I made it with and through feelings of ambivalence about the relevance of performance, the effort of gathering, the futility of cycles of the same old shit…and through the work I felt like I arrived at a different place in relation to live work. It feels exciting to think about this work as a host work…
And then I spent some time feeling into who I’d really like to see perform, who I’d leave my house for!
You’ll also be performing on the night – how do you balance the roles of curator and artist?
I think I would even distinguish a bit the roles of artist/choreographer and performer too. Sometimes I can think that I’m wearing a lot of hats and worry that I will be unable to attend to all the details and the other artists as well as I’d want to, but there is a great team around me to support. I’m also someone who works and thinks best when there are multiple simultaneous things going on. Working with a kind of wide focus and a holistic approach rather than trying to narrow or reduce makes sense to me and to how I experience being in the world. It feels good and useful for me to be thinking through and working relationally and the way that I approach curation is that it comes out of a desire to create context for my work through situating it in proximity to the work of artists I feel a connection to or dialogue with. I’m very much following my feelings of being drawn to works or being curious about an artist and where they’re going with their practice.
My work is interested in ideas of hosting, the ways that our bodies are hosts to different experiences, memories and many tiny life forms; in the ways that architectures and elemental bodies are also hosts and that there is always a live ongoing exchange between our bodies and spaces/places. This format of inviting other artists to present work within the environment and scenography of one of my works is a nod to this constant exchange and influence. It’s always bigger than just me or you. I’m remembering someone the other day (can’t remember who!) speaking about how a good host is one who is not afraid of being changed by the encounter. I want to be moved, somehow altered, when I watch performance and through doing the performing.
Who or what influences and drives your creative process?
I’ve been told I’m a bit of a sponge. Fragments from conversations with friends often end up in voiceovers for my shows, quotes from films, lines from pop songs, something someone said in the sauna that made me think, something that’s stuck with me from a show I saw 15 years ago, a sensation or a scene from a dream…I feel very aware of porosity of my body, how it is (I am, we are) full of holes and everything that I am exposed to goes in. I am busy with this as a concept in my practice and aware of this as a person in my daily life. Everything I encounter influences me, whether I want this or not and I think this affect, this experience of being moved and being altered is what I’m working through in the studio. This bizarre situation of being alive, being a distinct individual and simultaneously connected to every other being on this planet. I’m interested in the impacts of entanglement, questions of agency, autonomy and fate…how we relate to one another and stay present with ourselves.
You’ve mentioned a ‘dark, stripped-back feeling’ to ‘I’ve been looking for things that last’ – how crucial is that sense of darkness to your work and this particular event?
I like to work with darkness because I am interested in connecting with sensation, internal experience. Living in a culture that functions on the primacy of (eye)sight, and this sight being associated with knowing, it feels important to intervene in these narratives, to remember that there other kinds of knowing around which we can orient ourselves and move in the world, to remember that feeling is also a kind of sight, that not being able to see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there, that it’s not real or that it’s a threat. I remember someone saying that everything grows in the dark, darkness is a fundamental part of our experience,
This event was commissioned to celebrate 25 years of Home Live Art. What innovations or themes do you see shaping the future of Live Art?
I think that the ways that the war and genocidal projects we see ramping up in Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, Congo, and the support for this from our government exposes the priorities of the colonialist West as being anti-life, in all of its forms, and ‘the law’ as a concept only applicable to the subjugated. We see and feel the extractive nature of the systems we live within and we see how ruthlessly people speaking out against a regime based on extraction and divisive strategies are punished, silenced, isolated, imprisoned, killed. This whilst we are still processing and integrating the impacts of the pandemic – physical, emotional, psychological, cultural and legal. The cuts to arts funding, closing venues and a centrist government that doesn’t value art are going to be shaping the near future of Live Art.
Grief is already a theme, a cry, a call and no doubt will continue to be. There is also already a (re)turn to magic, to mystery and unknowing, to ideas of faith which I think emerge in response to a system and political climate that holds nothing as sacred and is collapsing. I think we are in a long period of transition, and Live Art will be working through themes of in/stability and new models for connecting with others, the earth and the cosmos, different kinds of augmentation and hacking – and conversely, isolation.
I’m just naming what is already happening really! I don’t know where this goes next…
The event features all queer artists and is produced and commissioned by queer-led organisations, but it’s not being explicitly promoted as a ‘queer event’ – why is that distinction important to you?
I guess I find the tendency or expectation to lead by announcing the intersections of my subject position kind of awkward. At this time and in this context, I’m interested in encounters, not foregrounding labels or identity markers; I’m interested in embodied practices, embodied ethics and the transformative powers of art towards collective liberation through opening up and strengthening connections to the potentials of our individual agency.
As a Londoner, what are some of your current favourite London spots to visit?
I’m into the classics – the Barbican, Kew Gardens, walking along the river…
Don’t miss I’ve been looking for things that last on 25th October at Shoreditch Town Hall – book tickets now!
I am Joint Editor at To Do List. I like: nice pubs, film marathons, not doing real marathons, bad comedy, plays/musicals with shorter second halves, and the Oxford comma.
