Five Optimizer evenings offered points of entry for different groups and an opportunity to experience work in dialogue. Each evening revealed or highlighted different facets of Metabolizer. Over the course of Optimizer the role of the host space – 37 Looe Street – and its directors Angela Piccini and Sefryn Penrose, who attended all the evenings, also became a point of reflection. This page intersperses photos from the evenings with short reflections on insights.
Material Entanglements / Manuela Albrecht
Manuela – invisibility, condensing the existing but invisible into the visible / tangible experience – leaving traces which make the invisible more perceptible…this sense of condensing into tangibility is in common with my work / intentions and was made visible to me through this practice-conversation between Metabolizer and Material Entanglements. The next morning we each chose a card from the Gull Tarot, part of 37 Looe Street’s created by Sefryn Penrose.
Up, Across and Along / Kyra Norman and Angus Balbernie
An art triangle: I invited Kyra because in a session with Angus he quoted Kyra saying “improvisation is the only economy” and this stuck to me like glue. Kyra said yes, and we spoke about her work Up Across and Along which follows trajectories of attention and resources. And Kyra invited Angus to perform.
A small but potent group gathered, what Angus called “a small but important space.” Kyra and I noted the difference between digital and physical audiences, and how performing for digital audiences is important for visibility – satisfying and also onerous. Mid-life transitions were another theme in following in
BRED
Me in dialogue with myself. Clarifying the difference between the focus on fleshiness and reproductive labour in BRED, and Metabolizer’s thinking through of qualitative / quantitative, exhaustion etc.
Industrial Democracy in Suspension: A Video Performance Lecture / Heni Hale
Revelations about labour:
Upstream: essay-performance / Bryony Gillard
Also the closing night – wastewater – fake / real – the fake smells of cleaning stuff – modernity –
- Kyra – digital / physical performance spaces (2 very different ones)
- Pope.L giving a fuck quote –
- Mid-life upheaval, transitional spaces –
- The Angus invitation triangle – he said something to me about her, I liked it, I invited her, she invited him.