Installation #27 - Laura Burns - ▲
Installation #27 - 5 Feb 2019
▲ is an ongoing artistic/discursive project started through the announcement of a river and its stones in 2015. It includes performance, writing, conversations, relational scores, healing sessions, sound channelling and theoretical propositions. It explores working with the nonhuman as primary collaborator, and seeks to find ways of re-configuring notions of society and community, to centre around the animate land and its capacity for imagining the human, at the core of material-spiritual-political collectives. It explores the role of immaterial, energetic, embodied practices and speculative choreographies to unearth emergent kinship and communication across human and nonhuman communities.
Laura Burns is an artist-performance maker and writer based in London. As a response to ecological crisis, her research considers the nonhuman and human ancestors as primary collaborators to develop a hybrid pedagogical and performance practice based on modes of deep listening. Her research with the nonhuman stems from studying and learning the oral poetry of land-based communities, interrogating the relationship between language and matter through practices of divination, sound-tracking, critical theory/thinking and dreaming. Working through dance and choreography, the act of stewardship is a position from which to explore what is possible at the boundary of performance making with the nonhuman. Figures which emerge through the imaginal space between bodies, are invoked as presences engaged in processes of critical thinking; currently the hag or grandmother as a consciousness that diverts notions of productivity and fertility, and whose vibration through river and stone, is guiding thought through a swallowing, dissolving circlusion of the world. Training in Systemic Constellations and Kundalini Yoga underpin her artistic practice.