Setting the Table

Organised by Jason E. Bowman.

Performance: PEACE (after Aristophanes)
Saturday, April 14
7–8pm, BALTIC 39 Project space
 

Setting the Table is a four-day congregation of organisers from arts, education and community projects. Its purpose is to explore exhibition-in-the-making by experimenting with organisational relations between people, art works, things and situations. It departs from a trans-historical perspective on utopian welfare systems, artist-organisation and community formation to interrogate the pathologisation of the “evils” that such ideas and state initiatives sought to eradicate: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease.

Artists, educators, researchers, curators and organisers present include: Jason E. Bowman, Melissa Rachleff Burtt, Kjell Caminha, Viviana Checchia, Julie Crawshaw, Avery Gordon, Andrea Hawkins, Katie Hickman, Deborah Jackson, Megs Morley, Sarah Munro, Deirdre O’Mahoney, Paul O’Neill, Justin O’Shaugnessy, Andrea Phillips, Matty Pye, Alex Sainsbury, Anjalika Sagar, Karen Salt, Marlene Smith and Mick Wilson.

Governance, sovereignty, self-organisation—and how to reimagine the role of exhibitions in reanimating communities of learning via creative actions—will be discussed whilst sat on artist Francis Cape’s Bancs d’Utopie, reconstructions of benches from European intentional and utopian communities. In solidarity with social housing protest groups, cabinetmaker Emma Leslie has produced trestle tables to be used during discursive lunches served from a makeshift kitchen. Produce includes: honey from The Woodlands Centre, now occupying the site to where Anna Essinger’s interwar New Herrlingen School, and its population of displaced people, was evacuated; pasta from an ancient strain of wheat cultivated by the art and organic farm Pollinaria; vinegar fermented from fruits gathered at William Morris’ orchard; and beverages by art project and social enterprise, Company Drinks.

Edith Simon’s reconstructed portrait of the first committee meeting she attended, as a founding member of The Artists’ International Association, will be present alongside a ‘sexuality class’ missive by Homocult; a basket by Sheila Walton, as depicted in Homer Winslow paintings from the era of the Cullercoats Artists’ Colony; a puppet produced by John Blundall for the Cannon Hill Puppet Company; and an illustration, Co-Education, by Keith Henderson.

Dressed in outfits, derived from Vera Mukhina’s pattern for an “everyday” school uniform, those assembled will rehearse a version of Aristophanes’ PEACE; a satire on ending war by creating solidarity and ceasing corrupt profiteering. Participants may interrupt rehearsals by blowing a whistle, as issued in the Lehman Brothers’ emergency evacuation kit, now incorporating pawned gold. Art-farming cooperative Kultivator have supplied animal dung. Tolling of the rediscovered hand bell from the Burston Strike School will announce a public. script-in-hand performance of PEACE (after Aristophanes) from 7–8pm on Saturday, April 14.

To book for PEACE (after Aristophanes), please click here.

Supported by: Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg and the Swedish Research Council. Dramaturgical support by Andrea Phillips, BALTIC Professor and Director of the BxNU Institute at Northumbria University.