"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 and 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.

Language no problem

The 6-hour performance on Friday has an open-door policy: feel free to come and go as you please.

BIO

SERAFINE1369 was previously working under the name Last Yearz Interesting Negro (2016-2020) and is the artist and dancer (++) Jamila Johnson-Small. SERAFINE1369 works with dancing as a philosophical undertaking, a political project with ethical psycho-spiritual ramifications for being-in-the-world; dancing as intimate technology. Their work is informed by research into movement and dance as a tool for divination, decoding messages from an oracular body – on personal/structural/symptomatic/somatic/psychic levels – to be processed through the medium of choreography. Always thinking about the metabolic – impact and exchange through/in/as movement. Their shows work with darkness, voice, bass, words, texture, energies and sculptural objects to create stage/dreamspace/battleground, decompositions, atmospheric landscapes created through the live unfolding of the tensions between things that produce meaning.

SERAFINE1369 has a relational, cumulative and often collaborative practice, gathering and transmitting information through working in various constellations, at different scales and in different roles to build spaces for communing/attuning/communicating through dancing, performance, listening and conversation; spaces that might hold the complex, multiple and contradictory, spaces that consider movement and transformation as inevitable, working to be unsettling situations of non-dominance.

Usually based in London they were Torchlight Artist at Siobhan Davies Studios from 2019 - 2021, won the Arts Foundation Futures Award for Visual Art in 2019 and are the In-House Artist in Residence at Gropius Bau, Berlin for 2021/22.

Long term creative team includes Jackie Shemesh (Light Design), Josh Anio Grigg (Sound Design) and Katarzyna Perlak (Photography). Regular collaborators include AGF HYDRA, Phoebe Collings-James, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome.
https://www.basictension.com/

concept, text, performance: SERAFINE1369, sound design Josh Anio Grigg, commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2021