Nottingham Contemporary

Taking place in Nottingham Contemporary’s Studio and Park Tunnel, a cavernous subterranean passageway beneath Nottingham, this itinerant workshop will explore counter-archives and audiovisual collage making.

The introduction session will depart with the work of the late Angolan anthropologist Augusto Zita N'Gonguenho, whose partially recovered research is the focal point of ongoing project, mobile museum and archive—tecktonik:TOMBWA - Café Mito da Utopia(1). At Park Tunnel, participants will interact with the site using audiovisual tools and embodied approaches informed by the anthropologist’s radical field experiments in the Namib Desert.

Throughout the workshop, participants will be encouraged to connect multiple geographies using Zita’s concept of a linha do pensamento / a line of thought. In contrast to a border, Zita’s linha do pensamento symbolises, ‘an unstable fluid threshold of endless possibilities, and the moment when two opposite paradigms intersect and clash causing a foundational change’.

In the broader framework of the exhibition, Hollow Earth: Art, Caves & The Subterranean Imaginary, this workshop places desert worlds into dialogue with subterranean-adapted ecosystems. Climate change, as Shannon Mattern(2) writes, ‘seems to have given rise to a new geographical form: terra perdita—lost landscapes’. By interweaving lines of thought between the Namib and Park Tunnel, we will explore how listening to a landscape or site can attune us towards transnational and more-than-human networks of relationality.

Materials, impressions, sketches, and field recordings formed during the workshop will be stitched together to create an audiovisual cartography of Park Tunnel. The outcomes will be shared on 1525 Collective's instagram.

This workshop is aimed at 18-30 year olds.

(1) tectonik.TOMBWA - Café Mito da Utopia Catalogue, Victor Gama, Stacy Hardy, PangeiArt, 2022

(2) Shannon Mattern in Avery Review, ‘Terra Perdita: Mapping Lost Landscapes’ (2022)

About

Free. Limited Capacity.

Booking is required.

We are unable to provide British Sign Language interpretation for this event.

This event will be 5.5hrs long, and will include walking across the city from Nottingham Contemporary to the Park tunnel and back (a distance of 1 mile each way).

If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing chantelle@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phoning 0115 948 9750.

Glossary

• Cavernous: A large dark enclosed space, resembling a cavern, a large cave or large chamber in a cave.
• Anthropologist: A person formally trained in the discipline of anthropology, broadly described as the study of the origins, cultures, customs and connections humans have with one another.
• Audiovisual: Technology or tools which involve both hearing and sight.
• Embodied approaches: Types of movements and gestures which result from inner knowledge which resides in the body and knowledge that is gained through observation, imitation, and practice.
• Relationality: Referring to a view that all forms of existence require a relationship or connectedness to other things, that nothing exists in an atomic, planetary, or cosmic scale in isolation.
• Cartography: The science or practice of representing a geographical area, usually in the form of a map or chart. Counter-mapping is a strategy used to map as a form of activism against dominant power structures and is achieved through collective action led by communities or activists.
• Auditory: Relating to the process of hearing, rather than sound itself.
• Transnational: Operating or extending across the boundaries of a state, i.e., a country or territory.
• Interweaving: The act of twisting or blending together two or more things so that they cannot be separated as easily.