Arcade East, London
Friday, 23 August
15:30 – 22:00

“It is rather that there are always connections yet to be made, juxtapositions yet to flower into interaction — or not — potential links that may never be established. Space then, sensed in this way, is not a completed simultaneity in which all interconnections have been established, in which every place is already linked to everywhere else. There are always loose ends. If you were to make a map that really had the characteristics of this space, it would be entirely possible to fall through it.”

— Doreen Massey, Some Times of Space

Failed States presents an expedition through the intertwined terrains of place and identity: a miscellany of talks, poetry, discussion, screenings and sound performance. Artists, writers and activists explore shifting cultural landscapes, endangered queer spaces, borders, refuge and the poetics of the city.

Join us for the entirety of the programme or drop in as you please. Refreshments will be available throughout the day, along with a free bar in the evening.

Schedule

15:30 – 16:00
Jasleen Kaur
I Keep Telling Them These Stories
Film

A sequenced diptych of archival footage and video notes on identity, memory and colonialism taken during travels and family gatherings in India and Scotland. Time and scale expand and contract, while topographies, flora and fauna merge, transcending location; the entirety is threaded with defiance, generosity and love. I Keep Telling Them These Stories was first installed as part of the exhibition Where I Am is Here at Hollybush Gardens, London, curated by Helen Nisbet and named for a film by Orcadian artist Margaret Tait.

I Keep Telling Them These Stories
2018, 10 minutes 
D. Jasleen Kaur
UK

16:00 – 16:50
Richard Fung
My Mother’s Place
Film

An experimental documentary focusing on the artist’s mother, a third-generation Chinese-Trinidadian who at 80 still has vivid memories of a history lost or quickly disappearing. The film interweaves interviews, personal narrative, home movies and verité footage of the Caribbean in an exploration of the formation of race, class and gender under colonialism. In a 2002 essay, the theorist José Esteban Muñoz wrote: 

Fung’s relationship to and love for his mother is at the centre of My Mother’s Place. The video paints an endearing portrait of Rita Fung as a woman who came of age during colonialism and took her identifications with the colonial paradigm with her to the moment of decolonization… This video portrait of his mother is a queer son’s attempt to reconstruct and better understand his identity formation through equally powerful identifications, counter-identifications and disidentifications with his mother and her own unique relationship to the signs of colonization.

Richard Fung is an artist and writer born in Trinidad and based in Toronto. His work comprises challenging videos on subjects ranging from the role of the Asian male in gay pornography to colonialism, immigration, racism, homophobia, AIDS, justice in Israel/Palestine, and his own family history. He is Professor Emeritus at OCAD University.

My Mother’s Place
1990, 50 minutes
D. Richard Fung
Canada

17:00 – 17:30
Imani Jacqueline Brown
Remote Sensations of Disintegration
Talk

Pulling together multiple strands of research and writing, New Orleans native Imani Jacqueline Brown considers ideas of home and practice from the perspective of her current London location. She writes:

A coast erodes. A city floods. A person moves. A deeply situated practice is dis-embedded, re-embodied, shifts its focus, sees from the bird’s-eye-view, senses from the ancestor’s-eye-view. What does home mean anymore anyway, if one’s home has already faced (survived?) the end of days, if its people have been displaced, if it has become unrecognizable to those who remain, if its future is condemned by foreseen cataclysm? Can home be anchored against rising seas? As we migrate to escape ecological degradation, we carry traces of home within our cells.

17:40 – 18:10
Ben Walters
A Queer Sort of Heritage: How We Got the Royal Vauxhall Tavern Listed
Talk

In 2015, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern — perhaps the UK’s most enduring site of queer community and performance culture — became the first building to be listed due to its LGBTQ+ heritage. The author of the successful listing application, Ben Walters, recounts the tumultuous journey taken by RVT Future campaigners as they confront corporate real estate developers, counter specious preservation campaigns devised by PR companies, and implement performance, spectacle and a barrage of queer creative ingenuity to highlight their cause.

18:15 – 18:50
Felix Bazalgette
Welcome to Harmondsworth
Film and discussion

A short film following a tour group in a picturesque English village, unaware that Europe’s largest immigration detention centre sits on its outskirts. Following the screening, former Harmondsworth detainee, Usman Khalid  — whose voiceover provides a stark juxtaposition to the film’s imagery —will join Felix Bazalgette, one of the filmmakers, in conversation.

Welcome to Harmondsworth
2019, 15 minutes
D. Felix Bazalgette & Toby Bull
C. Joshua Hughes
UK

19:20 – 20:00
Rosa-Johan Uddoh
Black Poirot
Film and discussion

In Rosa-Johan Uddoh’s film Black Poirot, the artist confronts and confirms her long-held suspicion that Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot —  “the foreigner with nowhere else but a hostile England to call home… who is never quite accepted… situated inside the manor house but socially outside it…” — is black. Upending the familiar structure of an episode of the long-running TV series, Uddoh’s narration, investigations and assembled found footage comprise an eclectic array of references, relating each to the constituents of a classic whodunit: crime scenes, clues, evidence (or lack of), fabricated witnesses, suspicion, accusation and wrongful arrest all contrive to reveal a “western epistemological colonialist plot”. Following the screening, Uddoh will be joined in conversation by Philip Serfaty, curator and the director of Black Tower Projects.

Black Poirot
2019, 20 minutes
D. Rosa-Johan Uddoh
UK

20:10 – 20:40
Richard Scott
Oh My Soho!
Reading

Poet Richard Scott reads his epic tour de force Oh My Soho! in its entirety for the first time. The poem is described by publisher Faber & Faber as “a night stroll under the street lamps of Soho Square becoming a search for true lineage, a reclamation of stolen ancestors, hope for healing, and, above all, the finding of our truest selves”. By way of annotation, Scott has compiled a collection of imagery referencing the work’s rich strata and seams of historic, geographic and cultural references.

20:50 – 22:00
Time is Away
In Sound, In Place
Sound

For the final part of the programme, Elaine Tierney and Jack Rollo, the duo behind acclaimed NTS radio show Time is Away, present the latest instalment in their ongoing reflection on time, place, power and history-making. Weaving together music, field recordings and spoken word, Tierney and Rollo will create something that is part soundscape, part immersive essay.

Bryony Quinn
The Spaces In-between

Throughout the programme, writer Bryony Quinn will bridge each segment with brief explorations into place names and naming places, and how etymologies behave like topologies.