In the first of her self-conceived series, The Dinner Party Reloaded, a virtual dinner party with selected artists and writers, Susanna Crossman meets Chiara Ambrosio, Lottie Whalen and Jemima Yong to discuss their creative projects, the looseness of time in lockdown, contact and intimacy in our increasingly digital age and the joys of chickpea stew.
WELCOME NOTE:
THE DINNER PARTY RELOADED, 12 JUNE 2020
The Dinner Party Reloaded (TDPR) is a gathering of words, art, culture and food, bringing together writers, visual artists, translators, dancers, musicians, actors and thinkers from around world. Each month we invite 3-4 guests to meet virtually, sharing their work and thoughts while eating, drinking, and cooking because, as Virginia Woolf wrote, “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
We invite each guest to contribute a post. This could be: a photo of you eating a peanut butter sandwich while perusing the pages of Martha Graham, an image of you cutting lino-prints as you cook a gourmet Indian meal, or a extract of Ducks Newburyport (or your latest draft) read whilst while making baba ganoush because “the tail end of eggplants look like the blunt noses of killer whales.”
Yet much of each gathering is spontaneous, as your host Susanna asks questions and discussions evolve between the guests, because as Montaigne wrote, “The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.” Words and ideas bounce around!
The Dinner Party Reloaded is based on an extraordinary event hosted and developed by Susanna Crossman and Alexandra Marraccini; Les Ephémères: 24 women/24h brought together twenty-four international writers, translators and women from the book world on the 21st March 2020. Alexandra and Susanna met on Twitter, over a short story and a Tweet to raise women’s voices. The rest is history…
So, even in confinement, it’s time to drink champagne (or green tea), relish the space and connections arts and words give us, and dance on the table.
Susanna
The Dinner Party Reloaded Host and Guests:
SC – Susanna Crossman (host), writer and essayist
JY – Jemima Yong, photographer and performance-based artist
LW – Lottie Whalen, writer, researcher and co-founder of Decorating Dissidence
CA – Chiara Ambrosio, artist, writer and filmmaker
SC: Welcome to my house. Let me open my door. Come in. There’s tea brewing. My early morning tipple. Japanese. To be drunk before coffee. Outside, the garden is rain-wet after the storm. The sun shines. A soft revéil greets first light. Take off your coat. Sit down at the kitchen table, or stand while we chat. It’s early. Outside the birds are singing. Downstairs, my daughters eat cereal, watch cartoons. As I write, I am thinking about hospitality, homes, how we carry them like Penates, the Roman house gods who protected the hearth. Please, let us sit at the table. I just grabbed Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer from my shelf. Let me serve you tea in mis-matched cups. As we drink, we can channel our ancestors, the ghosts, people who held these cups between morning fingers. Gathering stories and images, to be told, untold, retold. Berger wrote, “Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent,” Narratives, chronologies, our words. Hannah Arendt wrote,“The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
The tea is steeped, light green. We sip, crack jokes and have much to say. Are you hungry? I am making lunch now, cooking chickpeas, to be served with tabbouleh and Turkish feta. I must get dressed. Brush my hair. More guests will arrive soon. Meanwhile, here are some words from Emily Wilson in her Translator’s Note ( I have changed he to she):
There is a stranger outside your house. She is old, ragged and dirty. She has been wandering, homeless, for a long time, perhaps many years. Invite her inside. You do not know her name. She may be a thief. She may be a murderer. She may be a goddess. She may remind you of your wife, your mother, or yourself. Do not ask questions. Wait. Let her sit on a comfortable chair and warm herself beside your fire. Bring her some food, the best you have, and a cup of wine. Let her eat and drink until she is satisfied. When she is finished she will tell you her story. Listen carefully. It may not be as you expect.
SC: Hello everybody, Lottie, Jemima, Chiara, I think you’ve all just arrived. How are you?
LW: Hi Susanna, Jemima and Chiara! I’m ok thank you, having a slight slump on this dull and drizzly afternoon…
SC: Hello Lottie. Thanks for coming to the first TDPR. Great to see you here.
CA: Hello all! Welcome to my home, and a pleasure to visit you in yours!
SC: Here in France we’re coming out of lockdown, are you still in confinement?
CA: London is strange, in some kind of waiting room – or salle des pas perdu, which is a term that makes more sense to me.
SC: Yes, even here as we come out of lockdown, it feels as though we’re in a limbic space, this makes me think of Jemima’s work Field, which has explored the notion of space during confinement through a series of photos. Can you tell us more Jemima?
JY: Hey everyone! Yes, I moved home on the day of the lockdown which was a strange and surreal experience. It was totally not planned in the way I expected so instead of a mature, well thought through process of moving, we ended up taking multiple ubers from our old place to this one! The vibe was very tentative and there was this anxious fission in the air. I now live on the seventh floor of an apartment building in South East London. And Field is a series of black and white landscape photographs of the neighbourhood green that my bedroom window looks over. What began as an attempt to continue making photographs in isolation, continued as a chronicle of how the public space was changing over the Covid-19 lockdown and is now… 11 weeks into the project…. I’ve realised it’s also a way I’ve gotten to know my neighbours. But they don’t know me…. it’s a solo exploration of the neighbourhood in a way.
SC: During the pandemic, I have written and performed work about the transformative nature of touch, proxemics and social distance. The necessity and drive to touch, be distant. I wondered if you have seen an altered state of use of space in your photos?
JY:
This is the first image I took on 30th March 2020, 2 weeks from the start of the UK lockdown. It has definitely changed over the weeks. Not necessarily in a way that was predictable. Or at least I tried not to predict what I was going to see based on media reports on the use of other public spaces or based on the new measures that the government was implementing. Let me look for a more recent image.
CA: Wow, beautiful! And captures the strangeness, the new alien quality of public spaces…
SC: Very beautiful. Edward Hall calls interpersonal relationships and space “The Hidden Dimension.” Be great to know how this dimension has changed. Chiara do you explore “the hidden dimension” in your recent film Raft, your “act of commitment to the mystery of presence?”?
CA: Well Raft is very much a project that relies on bodies being together, and physically present in space, and something that I’ve been thinking about very much in recent weeks. Jemima looks at the green form from her window, and it is interesting to think about how differently we see when we are within a space or outside of it- above it for example, like the angels in Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire”, one of the key inspirations behind Raft…
SC: Yes Laban, the dance theorist also talks about these dimensions of space. And our perception and movement.
CA: Movement and the way it determines our thoughts and conversations, and our ability to see or unsee aspects of the city is at the heart of Raft… and of my film practice more in general. Like a political commitment to seeing things into existence through physical communion.
LW: Yes it’s a really atmospheric image that speaks to the sort of uncanny sense of space that the city has taken on.
JY: One from Week 5 of UK lockdown
LW: I love the way you’ve caught the abstract pattern the shadow of their bodies make as they box!
JY: One from Week 8
JY: One from Week 9
SC: I agree with Lottie. They capture something uncanny, Freud’s thesis: unheimlich, the uncanny, a revelation of what is private and concealed, of what is hidden; hidden not only from others, but also from the self.
LW: It’s interesting that the bodies are almost all in motion, yet they look quite solid and static – again, uncanny in the way that they’re almost statuesque maybe?
JY: CA, when did you make Raft?
CA: I am currently editing it, I have been filming on and off for the past 4 years, and it is very interesting for it to reach into this strange moment of change… It will definitely have an impact on the narrative frame that holds the film together.
Looking at your photos Jemima I am also struck that the space that separates people seems huge, and yet I can imagine that from down on the field it would feel significantly smaller…
This is interesting to me at the moment, trying to negotiate a new way of existing in space with other people, both physically and spiritually.
SC: It is immensely challenging, how we communicate, love, care, debate, eat, share food, space during the Pandemic.
CA: Here is something I had written as an intro, and that feels quite relevant:
Hello everyone, and welcome to my home – which is currently also my studio, and a place where time and space overlap in wild and mysterious ways, perhaps not too far from the old alchemical labs we see in old engravings!
My life and practice intersects with that of my partner and my 2 year old daughter, and we react to one another in ways that always generate new perspectives, new departures, new horizons.
Being in a small space makes it even more explosive – our instruments sit side by side and fit together perfectly – instruments to make music with, to play, to draw, to eat, to care for – showing us how intimately connected all aspects of our lives are.
When I’m in my studio it is easy to forget about everything else, although I guess the body never forgets really… But these days, confined at home, I am constantly reminded of the engine that moves my hands when I draw, or edit, or take a photograph.
The rhythm of the day too has a much greater impact on my practice at the moment: morning light pours from the window, and that is the time for drawing and cutting my linos. Nights are for writing and editing my film, and more generally departing into reverie.
Perhaps one positive way to look at it…
SC: I love the idea of the nights being deviated to reverie. I feel like the night is an open space, where everything can be invented. How do you all feel the pandemic has altered your notions of time?
CA: As in Jemima’s photos, there is a huge difference in my perception of both time and space at the beginning of this lockdown and now. To start with everything assumed the contours of a nightspace – as you described it SC – wide, and unbound. It felt both easy and hard to exist within that frame. Now it’s harder for me, as things are trying to pull back towards externally imposed structures, and I still don’t feel able to fit back into that.
SC: It is like an unhinging, also. The hinge is like the axis of the world, and as though we can both reinvent time, and also have lost time. How about for you, Lottie?
LW: Exactly the same. Time just feels so loose and unstructured; and it’s a surprise to realise how much our concepts of time are linked to our mental states…I find it hard to organise my thoughts and writing when the days slide together. I’ve been reading Square Haunting recently, for an article for LWP, and it really struck me that many of the writers describe experiences of war time in quite similar ways – I found this quote by Eileen Powers quite apt: ‘The boredom of it is incredible. My mind has been blown out like a candle. I am nothing but an embodied grumble, like everyone else’. Not that I’m comparing our times to a war time, but I think there’s something similar in that collapse of the structures and routines that usually define our daily lives.
SC: I’ve been wanting to read Square Haunting. Wonderful. This makes me think, Lottie, Dada was born out of a moment of upheaval, when time and space, speed of machines, the devastation of WW1, Freud, Marx transformed perceptions of existence. Can you tell us more about Take Dada Seriously? And the legacies of one of my favorite avant-garde movements?
LW: Of course! You can take a look at our online platform here: www.takedadaseriously.com – we set up the project to mark the 100th Anniversary of the International Dada Art Fair, because of an increasing sense that the world the Dadaists were responding to parallels our own. As you say SC, this huge sense of upheaval, disillusionment with government and the failures of Western Enlightenment. But we also wanted to critique the movement – I think it’s so important that we don’t simply recover the avant-garde, but also interrogate their strategies and motivations. For example, Hannah Höch has gained increasing attention as a once overlooked avant-garde artist, but we perhaps don’t think enough about the ways some of her work enforced racist and colonial stereotypes. So that’s why the second part of the project’s title is key – is it worth recovering sometimes problematic avant-garde movements? What can we learn from them and how can we re-radicalise them.
SC: I love this. As an undergraduate and post-graduate researching these movements, I was always searching, as Donna Seamen describes in Identities Unknown, for who the one woman was in the photographic sea of white men in suits.
As this is a dinner party, would you like something to eat as we talk? I made chickpea stew this morning, and thought about Schwitters and Dada, and how I like to follow people in supermarkets (not as a stalker) but to buy random ingredients.
JY: Hahaha! Would love to hear more about how these adventures pan out! Do you follow them and buy the stuff they buy?
SC: Yes and then I research and try and cook it. If I can, I ask the person how to cook it; it has to be something I’ve never cooked before. I do this specifically in a 24h/7 Turkish supermarket called Greens Food Centre in Edgware. It’s one of my favorite places in the world.
LW: Feels a little Sophie Calle-esque as well – also your photographs JY! Observing and creating stories.
SC: Here’s the chickpea stew with some Turkish feta and some tabouleh. It’s vegetarian, but can remove the cheese if you’re vegan!
CA: Looks delicious! Since the borders closed, I have been feeling very far from my homeland – Italy – and I’ve been making an unreasonable amount of pasta!!
CA: Next to the pasta is a linocut I made this morning – because this is how it is these days, lino-shavings in the food et all!
I’ve been feeling so uneasy about the shrinking of the world into small, insular localities… Not because I don’t appreciate localised existence, culture etc.; it’s just that I’m used to existing in a world where such instances of locality are in dialogue with a wider notion of belonging…
I wonder how this will affect us all in the long run.
SC: Would love your thoughts on this Lottie and Jemima?
JY: Since lockdown, I’ve noticed some things that relate to the conversations above.
1) I’ve writing a lot of recipes for people. In letters, text messages, emails. I’ve never done this before and it’s brought about new thinking about the structure of recipes and the potentials for performativity in written instructions or procedures. Here’s a recipe:
A bowl
In the bowl, the sauce: olive oil and soy sauce (3:1 ratio), juice from half a lemon, 1 raw clove of garlic chopped up into little pieces, 1 chilli chopped up into little pieces.
Mix mix mix mix mix
Now the pot comes in.
Chop up 1 whole broccoli, place in boiling water for 3 minutes.
Drain broccoli and put into sauce.
Mix mix mix mix mix mix and viola!!!!!!
Tasty broccoli salad!
One of the things that lockdown has afforded is more regular contact with friends and family who live in different countries. My family is in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. And I am speaking to them way more now than I have ever done before, which makes me think about how the digital space can afford for an experience of international connections and host spaces of intimacy and nourishment. Much like this one! How to practise generosity and hospitality in the digital space is a question I am formally beginning to do research on with my collaborator in Singapore, Kei Franklin, and supported by an online residency through the Live Art Development Agency. So more thoughts on this in the future. But at the minute, our hypothesis is that “through leaning into performativity, articulating the essence of ‘the ideal host’, embracing abstraction, foregrounding artifice, and moving away from the mimesis of face-to-face interaction, we may inch our way closer to hosting an energising and nourishing online gathering.”
CA: I am scared though that in the future this leaning into online spaces may be used to distract us – especially younger people – from the understanding of how important it is to fight against the erasure of real bodies in real space, as a matter of social, cultural and political urgency. Most of my work hinges on sharing space and using our gaze, our bodies etc. in order to make things visible – in one’s own life or in many instances in marginal lives that are often framed out of the picture. I guess the question for me is how to integrate the two, especially in the near future, when real spaces – venues, public spaces etc. – will face a very real threat of closure…
JY: I think this research into online spaces CANNOT and SHOULD NOT take away from the understanding of how important it is to be in real spaces with real bodies. And I completely agree about looking toward hybridized strategies to hold space for connection. I wonder if a starting point that suggests that interaction in online spaces should never be seen as a replacement for or mimesis of live interaction. That actually drawing definitive lines between why online interaction and real space interaction is completely different and affords completely different terms of engagement, visibilities, types of interaction etc, will actually help us move towards more nuanced and informed collective understanding and appreciation for being together physically. I think online interactions at the minute (like Zoom) are tiring partially because we use the interfaces and expect them to be ‘real’ (or make up for the real), when in practice the gap between the expectation of presence and the reality of two dimensionality and absence, is what makes the interaction uncanny and exhausting.
SC: I performed a piece about touch, space, intimacy for Leap, a London based Zoom cabaret. The text can be read here.
What are your thoughts Lottie?
LW: Yes JY is spot on in terms of acknowledging the vital differences between the two types of interaction. I’ve definitely found meetings through Zoom exhausting in a totally different way to physical meetings, and more like a ‘performance’ in some ways. Particularly as it’s hard to get a flow of conversation going so I feel the need to prepare more (by the way, I’m really enjoying this use of Google Docs because it does feel so much more spontaneous!). Also picking up from JY’s thoughts, we found it quite a challenge to switch the Dada project to a digital platform (it was planned as a physical residency). We have a number of artist workshops and it’s really not a case of just doing the same thing online. You definitely need to think more about how to keep people engaged and come up with creative ways to make connections with them through the screen.
SC: I can imagine this must be particularly challenging with the performance aspects of Dada, like the Cabaret Voltaire. Ball’s poetry reading seems so rooted in an almost transcendental, speaking in tongues experience of voice? Live performance is a physical, sensorial, almost somatic, tangible experience.
LW: That’s true. One of our artists, Bettina Fung, has found quite a great way of translating this sense of spontaneous performance online though. She hosted an art jam for us, which involved a live collaboration on a Google doc, with prompts and all participants encouraged to draw/write/add images and edit each other’s work – they were also on Zoom at the same time, shouting bits of the poetry out and making random associations.
SC: Wow, that sounds like the glory of Dada, like Schwitters said, “Everything the artist spits is art.”
CA: And how can you spit whilst wearing a mask???? Help!! HaHa!!
JY: ahahahah good point!!!
SC: Whoops. (am giggling very loudly here) Haha, So, we’ll have to rethink Merz with a mask!
JY: My brain is sparking all over the place. I want to talk more about the erasure of physical gatherings and our various experiences and contexts in regards to that… but also some thinking around how being together physically and connecting through technology (whether that’s analogue technology like sending letters in the post or digital technology like the internet or the telephone) how those things can work together and make existence richer.
CA:
This is the last episode of my monthly radio show Raft on Resonance Fm, which explores exactly that! I used the telephone to record messages from friends both near and far. It was an extremely moving experience that reminded me of the role the (landline) telephone played in my childhood, when it really felt like a rope keeping me tethered to the people and places that I loved… Something I guess that is also happening now in the ways you’ve been describing JY…
(and by the way you can find out more about the radio show, which directly inputs into my film, here).
SC: I also work as a clinical arts therapist. During confinement, I had to work mainly on the phone, reinvent my practice with hospital patients. I wrote about it in Paris Review (you can read it here).
I’ve been constantly amazed by the human resilience to keep reaching out, trying to connect, through analogue, digital technology, however we can…
JY: Lottie, when I went to the Take Dada Seriously site, I saw the Art Jam! And did wonder whether it happened and how you’re planning to continue (if you’re planning to continue). Was there an audience for the jam? How long did it go on for? How many people were jamming? What were the terms of engagement? What would you do differently if you were to do it again?
LW: We’re hoping Bettina will run another session, I think she was really pleased with how it went and got a lot out of it. It was aimed at a youth audience – we began developing the project initially with a youth group in Brixton in mind. Going back to the conversation about digital v physical engagement though, I think they’ve found it quite tough to keep the group together obviously through the challenges of the pandemic and also the current climate around the Black Lives Matter protests. The facilitator is concentrating more on supporting the young people’s well-being rather than worrying about the arts projects. So attendance wasn’t massively high but it’s something we’ve learnt from and also I think it’s a session that could be really appealing to a wider audience too.
JY: This has brought to mind Company Three’s Coronavirus Time Capsule: “Every week we – and more than a hundred groups of teenagers across the world – create new videos giving an insight into young people’s experience of lockdown.”
CA: I think there is an interesting point perhaps to be made – going back to the quote you posted a while back Lottie – about the relationship between physical space/time and practices and virtual ones… it somehow brings to mind this book I once read, “Defiant Gardens”, which describes how people under duress (e.g. in war) started planting ephemeral gardens, that would only last a short while, as a way to GROW something, to watch something alive grow, in a place and a time of extreme absurdity and inhumanity (as in the trenches during WWI for example). I think this is a really interesting thing to keep in mind when thinking about how to move forward: our need to commit to GROWING something in real space and time, and let it ripple through space, especially considering that one of the biggest challenges we face as a species is climate meltdown.
SC: The idea of the ephemeral garden is extraordinary, and makes me think of Bachelard and the idea of the imagination, not as the ability simply to invent ideas, but to repossess and transform what is before our eyes. Imagination in time and space.
CA: Yes, and particularly at a time of danger, of repression, of fear. Radical imagination as a means to reach across divides. And I also wonder whether the question of physical/online touches on the usual issue of who the gatekeepers are, and how these hierarchies can be challenged in terms of accessing work, thoughts, ideas etc.
SC: Yes that voices aren’t erased.
LW: I love the gardening imagery and it makes me think about craft more generally. I co-run a project, Decorating Dissidence, that explores craft as a political art, and it’s been so fascinating to see how people have turned to making and craft forms in the lockdown. It feels like it’s really emerged as a way of staying connected, through virtual collective sewing projects etc. I particularly liked this project involving clay by Rosamund Coady. The artist left clay on her doorstep so her neighbours could make pottery.
JY: AHHH that is so wonderful!!! And this is in, presumably, lockdown?
SC: Stunning.
CA: FANTASTIC!!
LW: Yes it was a lockdown project, everything was dropped off at the doorstep so no physical interaction. But a brilliant way for people to feel connected, and something that can be done offline, which is so important. Something that’s maybe been taken for granted is the fact not everyone can access the internet – it’s easy to forget if you spend so much of your time online anyway!
CA: The radical power of the doorstep!! Where dreams are left, half-formed, to be finished by other pairs of hands!
SC: The threshold. The in-between. I am sorry to say our time is running out. This has been extraordinary; words on time, space, imagination!
LW: The door step is a perfect place to end things!
SC: Agreed, a place to return to.
JY: Hahahah! Can I quickly share a link with you guys…I have recently been recommended this lovely podcast by Hrishikesh Hirway and Samin Nosrat: https://homecooking.show – what a joy.
LW: Thanks JY and thanks to all of you for a fascinating and inspiring Friday afternoon chat. So much to read and think about over the weekend.
CA: And thank you all too!
SC: Thank you. Is there anything else you’d like to share? Please post the picture Jemima! Thank you so much for coming to the first TDPR, it was amazing, I love the spontaneity of these gatherings. The unexpected flow of thoughts and connections.
JY: I have a picture of food that I made a few weeks ago…. Fun at home turned into a photo series called Different ways to be together, different ways to be apart. This one which is captioned “Coming home from a long time away” feels fitting to our conversations today….
CA: Wonderful Jemima!
CA: Can I leave you with an image from today’s linocut I made (from a daily series in dialogue with greek poet Yannis Ritsos). Today’s sentence, which my image dialogues with, goes:
“if you never close your eyes, you’ll never grow.”
(view the whole series here: https://linocutmonochords.wordpress.com).
CA: I hope time never goes back to “normal”!
JY: Fingers crossed.
SC: Thanks so much for participating in this TDPR adventure! Loved meeting you all here.
CA: I feel very full now, I might need a whisky to digest!
SC: Will join you at the bar. But only if you bring the cigars!
CA: Deal! That’s how every meal usually ended at my grandparents’ home!
SC: It’s the same here in France. Le digéstif avec un cigare. Right I must go, three daughters are singing James Bond very loudly downstairs, doors banging….
Bye.
About our TDPR Host, Susanna Crossman
Susanna Crossman is an award-winning Anglo-French fiction writer and essayist, published internationally in print and online. She has recent/upcoming work in Paris Review, MAI Journal, Neue Rundschau, (2019) S. Fischer, We’ll Never Have Paris (Repeater Books, 2019), Trauma, (DodoInk, 2020) 3:AM Journal, Berfrois & more. Susanna regularly collaborates and runs international hybrid arts projects. She is co-author of the French roman L’Hôpital Le Dessous des cartes (LEK, 2015) and her debut novel Dark Island will be published by Delcourt (FR) in 2021. Susanna’s work can be seen via her website http://susanna-crossman.squarespace.com/ or you can follow her via Twitter @crossmansusanna Rep: Craig Literary, NY.
About our guest, Chiara Ambrosio
Chiara Ambrosio is a London-based filmmaker and visual artist, working with animation, documentary, photography and printed matter to explore the ways in which we perceive, remember, articulate and preserve personal and collective histories and sense of place. Her current ongoing project Raft uses film, radio broadcast and printed matter to imagine the city of London as a stage where encounters with real people and places speak to the role of local culture and applied imagination in shaping the identity of the city, creating a political and poetic form of resistance of the marginal, small and silenced. Chiara’s work includes collaborations with musicians, composers and anthropologists and has been presented extensively both nationally and internationally at venues such as The Whitechapel Gallery, Anthology Film Archives and La Cinematheque Francaise. For the last decade she has been a part-time guardian of books and their stories at Bookartbookshop as well as curating “The Light Shadow Salon”, a moving image salon, at London’s cult venue The Horse Hospital. Chiara runs a monthly radio show, Raft, on London’s Resonance 104.4 fm radio station, where she embarks on walks across the city with other practitioners, reaping and sowing stories within its streets. See more of Chaira’s work on her website acuriousroom.com and follow her on Twitter @ChiaraAmbrosio
About our guest, Lottie Whalen
Lottie Whalen is a writer and researcher based in Hackney, East London. In 2017 she completed an AHRC funded PhD at Queen Mary University of London entitled ‘Mina Loy’s Designs for Modernism’, which explored the avant-garde poet, artist, and designer Mina Loy’s multimedia art practice and decorative aesthetic. She is currently working on a book based on her thesis and is preparing a forthcoming publication about the women of Dada in New York for Reaktion (2021). Lottie is the co-founder of Decorating Dissidence, an interdisciplinary arts project that explores the political, aesthetic & conceptual qualities of feminine-coded arts from modernism to the contemporary. It brings together art practitioners, makers, curators, activists and academics to break down disciplinary boundaries and find new ways to critically engage with feminist art history. As part of this project, she curates exhibitions, workshops and arts events, and is an editor for Decorating Dissidence’s online magazine. Find Lottie on twitter @DrLottieW or email lottie.a.whalen@gmail.com.
About our guest, Jemima Yong
Jemima Yong makes performance and photographs. She is a Singapore-raised Malaysian residing in London. Collaboration, experimentation and time are central to her processes. Recent work includes Marathon with JAMS (Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award 2018): a performance about fiction, memory and the hysteria of crowds, and ROOM: an improvised storytelling experience that takes place in the imagination of the audience. She is a member of Documentation Action Research Collective, an associate of Forest Fringe and an alumni of The Curious School of Puppetry. See Jemima’s work via her website, www.jemimayong.format.com and follow her on Twitter @Jemimayong
