OFFERINGS
A weekend of live performanceClémentine Bedos, Eleanor Arnold, Elizabeth Salazar, Geraldine Hudson
26-28 September, 2025
Geraldine Hudson
A Rite of Sorrow
How would it feel, to hold grief
In the palm of your hand
And then you let it go…
The Rite of Sorrow is a 2-part interactive act, inviting in and giving acceptance to the overwhelming times of grief we are all inhabiting. Geraldine facilitates this performative working, through meditation and raw materials, allowing for decolonisation of our emotional connectivity.
Elizabeth Salazar
Piles of Pipes
Script by Elizabeth Salazar, movement by Romina Dazzarola
Pipes is the result of transferring the findings around water sanitation into a performance. In her usual poetically loaded way Salazar starts with an invitation for recalling forgotten dreams. With this performance, Salazar continues giving voice to the affections of water.
Departing from the notion of water as a deity, she shares her quest to illustrate the sanctity of water intertwined with salubrity. Pipes is where the construction of societal hierarchies are exposed and mocked.
Eleanor Arnold
Oh, Shephard!
Curated by soft shock collective
Participatory choir ensemble piece scoring the Shepard scale, a series of tones spaced at intervals and overlapped to create a suspenseful auditory illusion of continual ascension. Collectively performed, Oh, Shephard! experiments with digital overload and mutual unease, and the possibilities of moving through feelings of discomfort in shared efforts of reenactment and rituals of group vocalisation.
Curated by soft shock, a London-based curatorial collective led by curators Júlia Polo and Georgie Worth, whose curatorial ethos is shaped by interdisciplinary research in the fields of ecology, memory and place. They aim to mediate active modes of participation and facilitate plural spaces for intergenerational and interspecies knowledge sharing, collective slow doing and process-oriented practices.
Clémentine Bedos
The Eternal Exchange
With ãssia ghendir, Mohammed Rowe, and Robert Hall
The Eternal Exchange is an invitation to connect through breath and to summon our essential interconnectedness. In this participatory networked performance, audience phones become channels of vital energy, extending the performers’ breath and transforming Nunhead Cemetery Chapel into a living symphony of respiration.
Amidst the ruins open to sky, trees, and spirits, the work offers a vital pause — a chance to rest in the play of opposites and return attention home to the body. In an increasingly irrespirable world, it reclaims our “right to breathe,” subverting technologies of racial capitalism into tools that honour life.
A collaborative project by Clémentine Bedos, ãssia ghendir, Mohammed Rowe, and Robert Hall. Supported by Immersive Arts funding.
EARTHWORM FANTASIES
Joanna WierzbickaLive performance by Aga Ujma
14-27 July, 2025
The ground beneath the city is warped with tunnel systems, some likely begun in prehistoric times,connecting to medieval passageways and intersecting with modern sewage networks and undergroundtrain tracks. During heavy rainfall, parts of this subterranean world flood, rainwater sweeping debris from the city streets into its unknown underworld. Some of the tunnels lead to chambers with beds carved into soft carboniferous limestone, underground churches and chapels chiselled by hand by the faithfulservants of a prehistoric god. These are painted in red and yellow plant dyes, with drawings of extinct beasts pierced by sharp flint spearheads beneath the caverns of forgotten, soft-stone architecture.
The underground cathedrals are now home to all sorts of outcasts, thinkers, anarchists, and political runaways seeking refuge in the subterranean realm. This is where we gather each full moon to performrituals of growth and multiplication, pulled by lunar gravity. We cannot be named as individuals, for weare many. You cannot name a multitude.
Of these underground insides, the lining is soft, like a newborn’s mouth, coated in fat drained from dinners into domestic kitchen sinks. New amalgamations of matter ferment in seeping, bubbling, fizzyfluid. Voices of the dead speak as they are transformed into an ever-growing, multiplying primordial soup.We are the soft membranes lining the walls of these tunnels, deposits of waste metabolised by wildyeasts and microbial mats, oozing from the ceilings in soft, jelly-like stalagmites. Empires vanish beneathour skin, a diversity of cells figuring out what form to take next. In decay, the powers of law, state, andreligion break down and ferment into the nutritious broth that feeds underground root systems. The misadventures of matter begin in the soft gut lining of an earthworm.
To give this a soundtrack: imagine trickling water, subterranean rivers, discarded words and drunkencries bouncing off walls thinned by water erosion. It is not easy to stay sober with ideas too dangerous fora hegemonic society. Hidden in the caverns of prehistoric shrines, these words coat pieces of rubbishthat refuse to decompose, waiting to be flushed back to street level by the next heavy rainfall.
Love dwells in the dampness as we digest, as the gravity of the full moon makes us amorous and willingto expand. Ambient auditory hallucinations are likely in the presence of toxic mould that feeds on bodily fluids laced with unknown chemical amalgamations. Tremors are induced by passing trains. The bloated underground stomach releases steam through street potholes.
If water has memory, does it remember every body it has passed through? The soft, salty entrails of prehistoric trilobites, the mouths of dictators, the intestines of the city. Does it know what is coming as it bathes the cells of newly mutated multicellular beings, as it is purified in treatment plants and putrefied inheaps of compost, as it shifts and swirls into the clouds?
Text by Urtė Janus
SURFACING
Paola Bascón, ãssia ghendir, Rosaleigh Harvey-Otway, sarah koekkoek, Jol Thoms, Silt Ensemble12-13 October, 2024
It’s so simple, a sudden, subtle shift in the colour of daylight sets a group of sparrows, lazily warming themselves on a hot wall, into motion as they sense the gradual turning of the weather. Approaching clouds soften the contrast between the gleaming sun and the dark shadows cast by tall buildings on the pavement.
It’s so simple, the transition from the noon heat into the moist hum of evening, as the weather turns, bringing distant rumbles of thunder that fold into the the fading murmur of airplanes dissolving into the crimson clouds. There’s a smell of ozone, electricity suspended in the air, swept in by a gust of wind. It’s funny how quickly everything can fall so quiet, quiet enough to hear the gaze of a crow passing through the layers of evening, like a dim memory pressed onto the skin. Vibrational forces of drone bounce off the flaking walls and bodies suspended in shifting postures, as an old marsh, now engulfed by the ever-growing city, exhales its thick moisture into the cooling evening air.
Turning is the motion that transforms the vision of the dimming sky into the flow of water, with sudden flashes of lightning rippling across its surface. It’s the motion that blurs the boundaries between sound, the texture of brick walls, and the shadows lining streets edged by old trees. It’s the motion that turns objects into a geometry of continuous lines, shadows into the flow of rivers, as passersby disappear beneath the surface of the water, and evening slowly drops its veil of dusk.
It’s hard to bear the thick silence just before the rain. There’s a texture to it, a putridness like the darkness of a dream, something you can breathe in, something that envelops you. And then it strikes, right overhead, an explosion of thunder unleashing torrents of water that crash over the streets, sweeping down to the riverbanks and sea edges in rainbow-hued petrol clouds, pierced by wooden sticks wielded by children. The sudden currents strip away the aging city mud, revealing prehistoric riverbeds studded with extinct mollusc shells and terracotta vessels bearing fingerprints pressed by ancient hands, glimpsed only briefly before they disappear beneath the slimy surface of wet clay, as the high blow of a singer's voice pierces the vibrating thunder drums.
Like the ocean’s rhythm, where every other wave is higher and more furious than the last, fragments of last night’s dream spin on the swirling veneers of rainwater. A hand with a cigarette traces the muddled and slightly bent line of the horizon, its soft orange light illuminating the sky. It’s hard to discern the distance between yesterday and tomorrow, the surfaces of stones from those of skin, as these distances expand within the mind, a mere centimetre can represent years of memory, a slight shift in serotonin, a total change in the evening light.
Text by Urtė Janus
SITTING IN SILENCE
A Weekend of Poetic ActivismLocal writing and poetry readings, children’s printing workshops, and drop-in meditation sessions
28-29 September, 2024
Curated by Yarda Krampol
As a child, I often retreated into silence in response to perceived unfairness. Raised by busy parents immersed in work and study, much of my formative years were spent under the care of my grandparents. This unconventional upbringing blurred the lines of traditional parent-child dynamics and hindered the development of my sense of personal authority. My silence wasn't a passive coping mechanism or a veiled act of defiance against authority figures; rather, it served as a quiet means of expressing disapproval - a subtle form of resistance, my little secret uprising.
The concept of peaceful protest became my philosophical muse, a form of meditation, and a practice of spiritual anarchism that has endured throughout my life.
The interplay between the mental-emotional ego, the autonomous self, and our silent consciousness struck a deeply resonant chord within me, echoing my apprehensions about the efficacy of activism. It's not about what we think but how we think. It's not about changing the world to a better place. It's about using our energy to make life better for the local community, for the person sitting next to you.
In Mark Losonzs' recent article, the author quotes Michael W. Taft's Anarchist's Guide to Mindfulness: "In a world that is constantly vying for your attention, becoming selective with that attention is an act of rebellion. … To sit, to really sit, is an act of rebellion. It requires you tune out the stimuli demanding your attention. It requires you to upend the traditional values of modern Western culture and stop. It requires you submit your desires to an intention. It is the opposite of what they want, and it flies in the face of all of the ways they've conditioned you. … It provides both individuation and communion. It's also one of the most radical things you can do".
The power of sitting in silence is the kind of rebellion we will explore through collaborative experimentation during our forthcoming exhibition for the Nunhead Art Trail weekend at Project Octagon, nestled within the serene confines of Nunhead Cemetery.
This multidisciplinary exhibition weaves together elements of sculpture, video, performance art, meditation, and poetic resistance. It serves as a platform for articulating diverse perspectives, inviting viewers to engage in a dialogue through the language of art and symbolism as we navigate the enigmatic terrain of silence and solitude.
Text by Yarda Krampol
THE STILLNESS OF THE DEPARTING LIGHT
Dan Nichols, Isabel Castro Jung, Louise Boer, Manuel Calvo, Natalya Falconer, Natasha Moody, Rocio Chacon, Zia Frances23-24 September, 2023
Chaos is coming. It is written in the laws of thermodynamics. Left to itself, everything tends to become more and more disorderly until the final and natural state of things is completely random distribution of matter. Amidst this prevailing disorder, life emerges as a rare and irrational thing. Its survival hinges on maintaining an unstable equilibrium – a system steadily marching towards decay, yet another manifestation of entropy. Life extracts its building blocks from the tumultuous environment, siphoning order from chaotic cosmic conglomerations. By means of digestive and nervous systems, cells harnessing sunlight for sustenance; lungs, skin, electric brain waves, tentacles, fingers, and intricate compound eyes that see the world in 360, it sorts out the environmental chaos into the oder of some sort.
Cosmos is an infinite noisy space. Everything in it is subjected to a constant bombardment of conflicting electromagnetic and sound waves. The Sun is singing. The low pulsing hum caused by the huge flowing rivers of solar matter has to be sped up a factor 42.000 to bring it into the audible human hearing range.
Ulysses spacecraft have made three voyages around the sun between 1994 and 2008. The scientists reading the data from the space craft discovered that the sounds generated deep inside the sun cause the Earth to vibrate and shake in sympathy. They have found that Earth’s magnetic field, atmosphere and terrestrial systems are all part of this sing along. The Earth moves to the rhythm of the Sun, it’s atmosphere, magnetic field and even voltages induced on ocean cables are all taking part in this cosmic sing along.
Legend has it, this building was designed to bask the chapel's center in perpetual sunlight, where the departed found their resting place. As the sun courses through the sky, its rays travel through into recesses, illuminating shadowed corners and warming the noon-heated rough stones. Through this dance, a life that traces its origins to stellar explosions absorbs the sun's parting radiance – a circle drawn to a close.
The Earth's rotational axis tilts away from the vertical, causing the planet to unveil subtly varied countenances to the sun during its orbital journey. Biannually, the sun's rays intersect the equator perpendicularly, ushering in universally twelve-hour day-night cycle.
Amidst this cosmic choreography, living organisms orchestrate their existence. They dance to the rhythm of day and night. These circadian rhythms, intrinsic to life's fabric, synchronise with the Earth's rotation, aligning the pulse of existence with the cosmic beat.
Text by Urtė Janus
55MA
Urtė Janus8-30 June, 2023
Curated by Olivia Grace Middleboe
55 MA is a new installation by Urte Janus, responding to the Anglican chapel in Nunhead Cemetery, London. In 55 MA, Janus explores the geological history of the site, drawing inspiration from the forms of the mangrove trees, fossils and abundance of flora embedded in the London clay on which the chapel was built. The title 55 MA takes its name from the Eocene, the geological epoch in which the London clay was formed. It comes from the ancient Greek ἠώς (ēṓs, “dawn”) and καινός (kainós, “new”).
In 55 MA, Janus explores the layers of time buried within the land on which the cemetery was constructed. The earth is an archive, recording the changes to our land, and the memory of those who have come before us. She is also looking forward, at what might be held here in the future.
Text by Olivia Grace Middleboe