SERAFINE1369 (previously lastyearzinterestingnegroisdead) lives and works in London, UK. SERAFINE1369’s practice is always relational, moving across spaces, contexts, roles and collaborations. They work with dramatic compositions of sculpture, electronic music, overwhelm, syncopation, internal narratives, texture, trance states, the public and dance, to build atmospheric landscapes through the live unfolding of the tensions between things that produce meaning. The resultant choreographies engage with questions of entanglement, alienation and sensation. SERAFINE1369 is the moniker of Jamila Johnson-Small, 2019/20 Torchlight Artist at Siobhan Davies Dance, UK. Recent presentations include CA2M, Spain (2020); My Wild Flag, MDT, Sweden (2020); Queer Performance Camp, La Chapelle, Canada (2020); Silencio, France (2019); Transmediale, Germany (2019); Palais de Tokyo, France (2018); and Institute of Contemporary Arts, UK (2018).
SERAFINE1369
SERAFINE1369 presented durational performance I I I (something flat, something cosmic, something endless) (2021) at Bluecoat Gardens on Sunday 20 March, from 2–8pm.
A work made in a moment when all that was there was this body, its dreams and nightmares and cycles and needs, sensations and wanting. I went mining. I haunt this work. I is a collection of already historical circumstances, remembered and un-remembered. I is a crowd. I is a trick of the light.
A durational performance inducing a state of expansiveness and detachment from the pressure to create - or be formed by - meaning through conventional narrative arcs. Its duration witnesses / tracks the rhythmic cycles, the peaks and troughs of an endocrine system beyond the arc of climax. The work situates a research and obsession with the unit of ‘one minute’ - asking whether we can transform the stuff of time or whether it transforms us. Considering the invention of colonial time and agency, the ways we inhabit its units of fixed endless measurement, even as this Time slips out of relation to the celestial bodies that have long been its anchor and justification.
Working with live and recorded text written over the last year from dreams and heartache and reflection - a wasteland of feeling - I I I (something flat, something cosmic, something endless) is a wide and flat landscape as score for performance. A reading, a listening, a movement.
The performance took place as part of Liverpool Biennial's Live Weekend.
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial. Images by Katarzyna Perlak.
Our full exhibition programme is now closed, but visitors can still enjoy art in person at FACT and Bluecoat until August & September. Plan your visit here.
