A
gig
on Friday 9th October. The event starts at 20:00.
EASTONIA is a series of four events this Autumn exploring perspectives on the British landscape through work by academics and artists inspired by the same place.
Each night is themed around a particular setting. This month's theme is ruins.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ELLEN SOUTHERN is a Bristol-based artist working with voice, sound, performance and drawing. Having grown up in rural Wales, Southern spent much of her time outdoors in the landscape, amongst castles and ruins, with just a sketchbook and her voice. She later spent several years creating collective arts spaces and collaborative projects in squatted buildings and disused sites across Europe. Having studied both Fine Art and Music, her current work also draws on years of singing in amateur choirs. 'Site Singing' is a self-initiated project, where Southern ventures out to conduct solo vocal experiments at a selection of English Heritage sites in the region, working directly with the acoustics to'vocalise' ruined sites. Using just a hand-held recording device, she crafts the resulting field recordings into evocative polyphonic'sound sketches', and draws sketchbook impressions of her experiences on the journey home.
THOM AND BETH ATKINSON, brother and sister, discuss their new photobook Missing Buildings, marking 75 years since the outbreak of the Blitz. Over a million of London's buildings were destroyed or damaged by bombing between 1940 and 1945. From the mysterious gap in a suburban terrace, to the incongruous post-war inner city estate, Missing Buildings reveals London as a vast archeological site, bearing the visible scars of its violent wartime past. But, more than a simple record of bombsites, the artists will explore this war as a myth; distant story of an epic battle, passed down to them through books, images and grandparents' memories. The Atkinsons will contemplate the effects of war upon the British psyche and suggests that the power wrought on our imaginations by the Blitz is a legacy as profound as the physical damage it caused.
BURL: In'Rites of the Gods', Aubrey Burl writes of how modern people living near the remains of neolithic monuments understood them as the souls of those who had been dancing and were caught by the rising sun.
BARRY PARSONS is a gardener, singer and writer. He holds a doctorate in American literature, and is interested in folk tradition and cultural memory. He will be talking about the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges's story'The Circular Ruins', and trying to answer the question, 'What is a ruin?'
WODEN DJs will be playing themed mixes between things.
ALL HALLOWS HALL is a majestic old building in Easton that volunteers are currently restoring to its previous use as a community hall after seven years of emptiness and fires.