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posted: 27/03/23 12:46

In-tuition at the Plough, Great Torrington

Please join us for the preview of Still Moving's ‘In-tuition’, an exhibition of new work inspired by the Commons around Great Torrington.

The exhibition features sculptures, films, works on paper and found objects brought together to embrace magic as a space of intuition, connection and possibility. The title, ‘In-tuition’, describes the artists’ desire to learn, using sensitivity to nature and openness to the way that it might speak through us.

Preview: Tue 04 Apr 2023, 6:00pm

Exhibition: Tue 04 Apr 2023 - Sat 06 May 2023

The Plough Arts Center, Great Torrington, EX38 8HQ

Still Moving is an artists’ collective set up by Laura Hopes, Léonie Hampton and Martin Hampton


About the Exhibition

England is a land that has been subject to ‘capitalist sorcery’ for over 500 years; a psychic and bodily rift between people and the land resulting from the history of the Enclosures, the destruction of the Commons and the persecution of the Witches.

Great Torrington’s own history of the Commons dramatically inverts this story. An ‘area of waste called the Common’, was given to the people of Torrington in 1194. This was formalised in 1889, when the Common’s Act was presented in Parliament in ‘An Act for vesting Great Torrington in a body of Conservators’. These 365 acres of common land remain vehemently defended and remain central to the traditions and defiant identity of the town and community. The free access to the land they represent is vital to nurturing dignity, sovereignty and a magical, intuitive connection to nature.

Still Moving’s practice aims to explore these psychic and manmade boundaries, unearthing ancient and modern ways of being in the world, mysterious, open and interconnected. By paying attention to the material and spiritual aspects of land, we stand to learn from the reciprocal relationship between people, nature and commons.

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Film Screening and Preview event

4th April 2023

To coincide with the opening of In-tuition, the Plough Cinema will present a free series of films made by the artists collective Still Moving. Running on loop throughout the evening of Tuesday 4th April, the cinema will be open for ‘drop in’ viewings. The preview will involve a Q and A at 7pm-7.30pm where Still Moving will be joined by some of their recent collaborators. This includes Dance Lab Collective (represented by Kerry Chappell and Pam Woods, both of University of Exeter) who will offer a short movement insight into the Kinasphere film-making process to open discussion.

The films

Kinasphere - Three dancers move between three choreographed worlds, scientific, urban and rural. There, changing environmental vernaculars entangle with the human body reminding us that we are in relation to the worlds around us and together become active agents of movement and change. Made in Collaboration with Kerry Chapell, Lizzie Swinford and Pam Woods. Funded by The Eramus+programme of the European Union (3min)

Continuous and all around us - A filmic collage of sound and image questions the ecological and sonic impact of housing developments in Pinhoe on the fridges of expanding Exeter. Made in Response to the practice of Sound artist Emma Welton. Filmed as part of Clyst Valley Regional Park's Routes for Roots project funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.(6.54min)

Zenae - The film takes its cue from ancient literature on matriarchal migration into Britain, reflects upon our ecological inheritance, and draws out a series of clues found in Greek, Roman, and medieval texts, including a late medieval poem about Syrian sisters’ flight to the then unoccupied islands of Britain. The film contemplates the stories of suppressed female worlds, and asks us to consider what their presence might offer our future. Made by Islands of Women Collective (Rose Gibbs, Alice Albinia and Léonie Hampton) Music by Full of Noises. Funded by Arts Council England (16min)

Our Body is a Planet - A short film that challenges the way we think of ourselves as individual genetically prescribed entities, independent from our surroundings. Without fungi and bacteria our bodies and biosphere would not exist; we are in partnership with the microbial world. Music by Meredith Monk, made in collaboration with the MRC centre for Medical Mycology. Funded by Arts and Culture University of Exeter and Wellcome Trust. (11.09min)

Worlding - The film explores how we might enter into a different relationship with land, nature and place in order to address the climate crisis that confronts us all. Funded by Take A Part, National Lottery Heritage Fund (10.38min)

Lacuna - The Colour of Distance - The orb travels a landscape, distancing its occupant by insulating them from sound, heat, wind, while at the same time utterly controlling them. Commissioned by OSR Projects for The Weather Station II (4.55min)

Traum - The camera enters the derelict landscape of the Lee Valley, London, UK, the site of the 2012 Olympics. Cut to a complex score by Isambard Khroustaliov the film proposes a way of looking through the surface of banal things to find new and surprising territories (16min)

(Total screen time 70 min)

At other times these films are available through our website www.stillmoving.org/projects

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Still Moving live research space

4th April- 21st April 2023

Still Moving will create a live research space connected to the exhibition In-tuition which will reflect our conversations and encounters in and around Torrington. Please feel welcome to interact with the objects and let us know if you have suggestions or additional offerings.


Matter at Hand MG 7952
posted: 17/01/23 14:20

Matter at Hand at Foto Forum Gallery, Bolzano, Italy

Léonie Hampton of Still Moving's exhibition Matter at Hand opened in Foto Forum, Bolzano, Italy on 31 May 2022

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posted: 17/01/23 14:20

Language of Seeds at Thelma Hulbert Gallery, Honiton

Léonie Hampton, A Language of Seeds,

14 January 2023 to 4 March 2023
A Language of Seeds is a series of photographs celebrating the artist Léonie Hampton's vegetable garden, family and friends responding to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery (RAMM)’s botany collection.

https://www.thelmahulbert.com/...

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posted: 17/01/23 14:18

ZENAE premieres at Tate St Ives

Zenae is a film made by in collaboration between Rose Gibbs, Alice Albinia and Léonie Hampton as the Islands of Women collective.
With Music by Full of Noises.

It takes its cue from ancient literature on matriarchal migration into Britain, reflects upon our ecological inheritance, and draws out the relationship between the work women traditionally do, caring for others, and the work of caring for the earth. It is inspired by a series of clues found in Greek, Roman, and medieval texts, including a late medieval poem about some Syrian sisters’ flight to the then unoccupied islands of Britain. The film contemplates the losses that rising sea-levels will bring, and through a focus on the natural world, seeks to find a ways of looking that promotes and protects a more nurturing approach to the land and our bodies.

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posted: 17/01/23 14:15

Pharmakon

Pharmakon, a new bronze sculpture for the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology by Still Moving at the University of Exeter was unveiled on 4th June 2022

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posted: 27/09/21 14:37

NO NEW WORLDS @ COP26

We are crowdfunding to take the NO NEW WORLDS sculpture to COP26 in Glasgow in November and need your help to make it happen

https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/...

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posted: 20/05/21 16:52

New Solo Exhibition by Léonie Hampton opens at RAMM Museum 18th May- 5th September 2021

Commissioned to complement the touring exhibition Seedscapes: Future Proofing Nature, Léonie Hampton’s body of work engages directly with the ecological emergency through a series of photographs that celebrate her vegetable garden, her family and friends, and the seeds in the collections at RAMM, Exeter. The exhibition is runs from 18 May to 5 September 2021. See here for more information.

Melinda and steph
posted: 24/11/20 10:15

Event: Indigenous Artists Panel

Still/Moving and Survival International in partnership with Dr Stephanie Pratt and Melinda Schwakhofer, invite the artists Cannupa Hanska Luger, Candessa Tehee, Ian Kuali’i and Jules Koostachin to discuss the complexities of the 400 year Mayflower history and their individual artist practices, in a panel chaired by art historian Dr Stephanie Pratt.

When: Tuesday 1 December 2020 At: 16:30 – 18.00GMT

Free Eventbrite link: CLICK HERE

During the month of November we have created multiple spaces for indigenous voices to be AMPLIFIED. Please submit a short quote responding to: ‘Tell us what the history of the Mayflower means to you.’ By following the links below or emailing us directly on amplify@stillmoving.org these will be added to the NO NEW WORLDS tags which are written and tied to the sculpture in Plymouth UK, and posted through social media: /StillMovingCIC & @StillMovingCIC

Through the Survival International Map: https://www.survivalinternational.org/campaigns/mayflowerskill

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posted: 11/11/20 17:43

Still Moving IN CONVERSATION: Dr Stephanie Pratt and Survival International this FRIDAY

Marial Quezada from Survival International, Sam Maltais, (Aquinnah Wampanoag), Dr Stephanie Pratt (Dakota) and Still/Moving will discuss the current campaign, #Mayflowers Kill. This conversation will introduce November’s Native American Heritage Month, and reflect on the place of NO NEW WORLDS and other artworks within commemorative programmes such as Plymouth UK’s Mayflower 400 Commemorations.

When: Friday 13 November 2020 At: 16:30 – 17:30 GMT

Free Eventbrite link:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/stillmoving-in-conversation-dr-stephanie-pratt-survival-international-tickets-125853911437


Speedwell Still Moving 6586
posted: 12/10/20 11:33

Speedwell 'Starter Tower' Talks Program

Throughout the duration of Speedwell's installation on Mount Batten Breakwater a series of 'in conversations' will be held between Still/Moving and invited speakers to discuss some of the themes raised by the project. The talks will be live-streamed online. Click here for a full list

Next up: Still/Moving IN CONVERSATION: 'Connections' with Marianne Brown 16.10.2020 @ 13.00

HOLD ME BESIDE YOU DUTTONS workded MG 9915
posted: 25/09/20 11:28

' hold me beside you ' A Site Specific Installation at Plymouth Art Weekender, 24 -27 September 2020

hold me beside you is a unique installation by Still/Moving for this year's Plymouth Art Weekender: 24 -27 September 2020.

The 2-metre distanced illuminated words respond to the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The site-specific installation explores the tension of proximity and risk in the physical structure of the Plymouth Citadel’s former gunpowder store. Originally created for The Box's 'State of Emergency' micro commission the words have been reconfigured to magnify our state of isolation and our dependence: our need to keep distanced, coupled with our longing for interconnectedness, revealing a shared vulnerability in the face of the unknown workings of the virus.


The work hangs on the north wall of Duttons Cafe, located above Elphinstone carpark which is one of the best places to see Still/Moving's other project Speedwell, on the Mount Batten Breakwater.

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posted: 07/09/20 15:38

Speedwell is Live!

Speedwell is exploring the idea of 'no new worlds'.

For the settlers on the Mayflower who felt they were sailing to a new world, it was a world that had been inhabited for many thousands of years by indigenous peoples who were greatly impacted by the arrival of the Mayflower and subsequent ships that followed.

We wanted to challenge that idea and to uncover previously overlooked stories of the Mayflower sailing but also to remind people that we only have this world and we need to look after it.

Come and add your voice to the structure either by filling in a tag with one of our volunteers or by adding your voice on our text and audio link

Speedwell's Poignant Message - Plymouth Herald

Re-Informed on the Mayflower 400 website.

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posted: 29/08/20 08:30

Speedwell, A Mayflower 400 Commission to Open on 4th September 2020

Speedwell, a large scale light installation funded by Plymouth Culture and the Arts Council, will open on Plymouth's Mount Batten Breakwater at dusk on 4th September 2020. Currently under construction it can be clearly seen growing on the horizon from the Hoe and the Barbican. See Speedwell Project page for more info.

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posted: 19/08/20 11:30

'touch' by Still Moving, "A State of Emergency Commission" by The Box, Plymouth's new Museum

Still Moving have been awarded a State of Emergency Commission by The Box, Plymouth's new museum, art gallery and cultural centre. The project titled 'touch' explores the two metre distance of safety forced under the pandemic regulations, a distance which paradoxically shows care through remoteness while enforcing isolation, yet in cases of coercion, hides from view those subject to a cruelty of touch.

The work explores these spaces, navigating from the distance of the horizon to the proximity of the home; the local. Moving through levels of intimacy and forms of touch from the caress of a lover, the lifting of a child to sharing a companionable proximity, the phrases ‘HOLD ME’, ‘TOUCH ME’, ‘BESIDE ME’ will be created using a low voltage LED technology.

The Box will open to the general public on Tuesday 29 September


https://www.theboxplymouth.com/state-of-emergency-micro-commissions/still-moving

Leonie and Kestor cropped
posted: 19/08/20 00:21

Léonie Hampton commissioned to create new work in response to seeds in Exeter Museum, RAMM’s collection

Still/Moving's co-founder Leonie Hampton new commission from RAMM, will explore the Exeter museum’s collection of seeds and herbarium sheets in dialogue with her own photographs of seed experiments, the garden and family. Creating a ‘story about love, growth, family and the archaic wisdom of plants’ the new artwork will place Hampton’s photographs of living and growing plants alongside that of the collected, dried seeds in the museum.

See: RAMM Museum for more info

Text

What is lost of this world if we travel anew?

Laura Hopes

The true casualty of the world left behind is a future wistfully imagined or carefully preordained.

Filling a bag, choosing which book, visiting those for embrace; the little moments of death in departure. These deaths are privileged with time, softened and rounded by choice, for they are the choice of the tired, not the exhausted. Although these choices mark loss, they are not yet the actions of the lost. They exist in a limbic no-man’s land of temporality; anticipatory and preparatory losses that foreshadow the immanent engulfment of the lost. They that traverse between worlds seem winnowed by this loss, worn smooth by the wave-actions or made angular through impact. Belongings and memories become cracked, tannic with handling. But what of the locus of departure - what is lost each time, beyond the Archimedes volume of humanity? Is the material fabric of the left world marked by absence or additionally silted with grief? Beyond the obvious absence of bodies, memories and relationships, the entangled threads of conversations, networks, families are left hewn, knots adrift, catching on the meshwork of buildings, trees, routes through cities and forests. The true casualty of the world left behind is a future wistfully imagined or carefully preordained.

What are the characteristics of the dystopia, the set of circumstances that propels one from an old world into a new? Tremors have rumbled, forcing bodies across this threshold from one world to the next. These tremors might be the bellows of Tartarus, the abyssal chiasmic terrain of death; voiced by the machinations of the factories at Elmina, the purging of those deemed unwanted from Rohingya, or the dispossession from land and civic life of those persecuted in Indigenous American territories. These forced exodus snatch at the threads of the original world in the rupture of departure, and take form in memory, song, food, language and skill, and the proximity, where available, of shared experience or heritage. What is stolen from the old world then, in this cleaving, is the knowledge, the companionship, the husbandry, the custodial ontologies which shaped it each day as it reciprocally shaped those tending to it. The soon-to-be faltering new steps in the new world lack this surety, this indigeneity to soil, to climate, to language, to food, but the possibility of the fungibility of the body and mind may offer the scope to acclimatise and become indigenous again.

If we do, when we leave, we take of that world in us, with us, in the treads of our shoes, the lint of our pockets.

Those travellers who made their voyage on the Mayflower and Speedwell for America in 1620 were not the first pioneers to transgress this threshold between worlds. Nor, in 1609, were the sailors on the Sea Venture, who along with eight other vessels voyaged from Plymouth for Virginia, England’s first New World Colony. They too were pre-figured by western European forays into what were termed the East Indies in the early 15th century and also by Hernán Cortés, who arrived in Hispaniola in 1504 to establish the colony that followed the conquest of Cuba and Hispaniola in 1506. This breathless querying of dates echoes the colonial impulse for imprimatur itself – who was first, which flag endured?

Imagine now those sailors aboard the Mayflower’s sister ship, the Speedwell, who never made the transatlantic voyage, but were pressed instead, to make home where they were; forced to contain and stifle their dreams of a New World. The fantasy act of making a New World remained untroubled by reality. This thwarted journey, this ghost of a new life, must have travelled with them for the rest of their days, colouring their interactions, their relationships and memory. Imagining the lint in the pockets of the sailors on the Mayflower, however, the earth in the treads of their boots which then commingled with the soils on the shores of the New World, these more troubling vestigial threads which linked their past lives to the new, were rent asunder in the rupture of this new life. Consider too, in this commingling of soils, the unimaginable violence enacted upon those for whom this world was never new but had existed “since time immemorial.”[i] It is hard to conceive of the conceptual disjunct between those for whom the ‘New World’ appeared as a talisman of their ‘Promised Land’ and those indigenous to the land for whom the sailors’ arrival heralded an ongoing era of dispossession, disease and decimation. In the sailors’ quest for indigeneity to this new soil, their systems of survival ushered in wholly alien structures of rule, land use and religion. In a construction of Indigenous sovereignty that Michael Lerma calls ‘Peoplehood’, he outlines the relationship between people and land:

Today, Indigenous nations can confidently state that colonial actors cannot eliminate something they never recognized: the inherent responsibility many Indigenous peoples have to serve their traditional homelands.[ii]

This duty is one of the many casualties of settler incursion onto sovereign land. After a brief period of commonality and mutual support, violent skirmishes signalled the oppressive regime of dispossession of the ‘native’ and their responsibilities to a living agentic land. This rupture, in the name of ‘progress’, prefigured a mode of subjugation of land and bodies that paved the way for more colonisation and the unswerving advance of capitalism.

I wonder if our ghosts haunt the old.

Severing the native from their sovereign land folds into settlers’ efforts to establish new lives on new soil, a reflexive violence of assimilation and dispossession:

One may think such a process was as arbitrary as it was one-dimensional, but that would be to forget that neither the colonist nor the colonized people emerge from this circle unharmed. To this extent, the act of colonizing was as much an act of conviviality as an act of venality.[iii]

The narrative paradigm of successful colonisation is the apparent power of the coloniser against the apparent muteness of the colonised. The hidden cost to both parties within the circle of harm that Mbembe outlines is distinctive of the reciprocal self-harm embedded with the active violation of others. The suppressing of perceived difference, and the inability to recognise commonality in the quest for ‘progress’ deadens any flourishing of new commingled life processes or forms of symbiotic sustainable living practices.

These atrocities surely emerge from a place of fear, of the other, of the strange New World that the settlers find themselves operating in. The savagery that they fear in the native is paradoxically the role they themselves grow to inhabit, and the realities and metaphors of survival and resistance afford them permission to act in ways perhaps previously considered sinful. Do these behaviours make them ghosts to their old worlds, their previous ways of life or do they consider themselves becoming indigenous to these new worlds through the adoption of a cloak of savagery? These narratives of appropriation and dispossession echo throughout global strategies of settler-colonialism, but the violences and realities of colonisation remain hidden from a sensitive old world purview, the blood that is shed in the production of sugar and tobacco never staining the capital, the product on polite society dining tables or in well-dressed men’s tobacco pouches. The ease with which this carapace is apparently shed, cast into the sea on the return journey to the old world belies the ease with which Eurocentric societies still fail to address the horrors of colonialism, the ongoing dispossession, environmental precarity, the need for reparations. As a visual illustration of this schism, Amazon have recently launched a video game, ‘New World’, where settlers in European garb have to fight against the exoticized natives, diseased zombies and the land itself in order to make their claim. That this should be deemed appropriate in the year of the 400th anniversary of the sailing and landing of the Mayflower seems extraordinary considering the ongoing dispossession and dispersal of indigenous Americans from their ancestral sovereign lands, specifically, the current annexing of sovereign Mashpee Wampanoag territory.[iv] These peoples, although not ghosts, certainly should haunt the imagination of the old world, and should haunt the retellings of this story, this foundational myth of modern America. Reclamations too, are undertaken by those, such as the Wampanoag people with whom contact was first made by the Mayflower settlers. The extent to which their culture was obliterated by colonisation can perhaps fractionally be comprehended when one learns that contemporary efforts to relearn the Wampanoag language could only be supported by the use of the ‘Eliot Bible’- a translation of the Bible into Wampanoag by missionary John Eliot in 1663.[v] This ghost of early missionary tactics in the use of Christianity to subdue, eerily lingers and is transformed and inverted through this process of claiming back the tongue with which to speak, not in the language of the oppressor, but by repurposing the oppressor’s tool.

All the while our new skins glow in this strange young atmosphere.

This tool casts shadows into the imagined future too. As a strange paradigm of how humans operate in ‘New Worlds’, Michel Faber in his book ‘The Book of Strange New Things’ describes a missionary, Peter and his experiences on a planet ‘Oasis’.[vi] Peter sets himself the task of translating the bible into ‘Oasan’, yet the utopia he attempts to build is sharply contrasted with events on Earth where his wife, Bea remains, a world splintering through climate emergency, societal unrest and crashing economies. He is successful for a while in this new environment, yet the asymmetry of power between the settlers and the Oasans, encroaching disease and unrest offer distinct parallels between the ‘new’ and ‘old world’ scenarios of the Mayflower and Wampanoag ‘contact’ and seem so poignant in light of mass contemporary migration and its manifold underlying causes. In this, the arbitrary, western ‘everyman’[vii] characters who voyaged on the Mayflower can be reconfigured into the less-discussed ’everyman’ of the colony, the Postcolony, the refugee camp

[i] Wilmer, F. (1993) The Indigenous Voice in World Politics: Since Time Immemorial, Sage Publications, USA

[ii] Lerma, M. (2014) Indigenous Sovereignty in the 21st Century: Knowledge for the Indigenous Spring, Florida Academic Press, p1

[iii] “Venality, because such is the essence of the relationship between human being and animal. Just as the ruminant, for example, feels an attraction to the salt in man’s urine, one could say that the colonized individual feels attracted to the colonizer’s excrements, and vice versa. Conviviality, because there is hardly any form of domination as intimate as colonial domination. But, as we have seen, in many cases the colonized individual—the object and subject of venality—introduced himself into the colonial relationship by a specific art, that of doubling and the simulacrum. Now, to simulate is to cease to inhabit one’s body, one’s gestures, one’s words, one’s consciousness, at the very moment one offers them to another. It works to preserve, in each time and circumstance, the possibility of telling oneself stories, of saying one thing and doing the opposite—in short, of constantly blurring the distinction between truth and falsehood. This means that, as an object and subject of venality, the native offers herself/himself to the colonist as if not himself or herself. The native opens to the colonist as if no more than an instrument whose author or owner was, in truth, separate: a shadow, a spectre, or, so to speak, a double.” Mbembe, A. (2001). On the Postcolony. University of California Press. Retrieved February 2, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppkxs, p237

[iv] https://newrepublic.com/article/157091/crisis-colonization

[v] http://ourmothertongues.org/language/Wampanoag/12

[vi] His mission is financed by and carried out under the auspices of a shadowy corporate called Usic. They need him but won’t say why. The base personnel describe themselves as “a community”, “in partnership” with the indigenous population – “we do not use the word ‘colony.’” Yet many of them specialise in oil and mining technology, and Usic is already building infrastructure to support a larger population. Trade has begun, although it has taken a weirdly localised form: the Oasans produce food for the human settlement; in return, they seem to want only Earth analgesics and the Bible, the eponymous “book of strange new things https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/23/the-book-of-strange-new-things-michel-faber-review

[vii] “We do need to correct the history myth that this ship was full of ‘decent Puritan people’ who had suffered religious persecution and wanted to make a new life. They represented less than half the passenger list. The other half were traders and merchantmen – people hoping to make a fortune.”

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/feb/15/richard-more-shropshire-outcast-who-sailed-to-riches-mayflower