Sonic Sermons: Performing Archives is a day-long workshop led by Joyce Treasure that offers participants space to explore personal archives as material for assemblage-making and embodied performance.
Through speculative writing, body mapping, and the creation of sculptural assemblage pieces, the session is designed to grow towards a collective participatory performance in which assembled objects become active presences.
Inspired by Cecilia Vicuña’s fragile precarios, which merge discarded natural and man-made materials, the workshop explores the impermanence and interconnectedness of life, viewing grief, rage, and ambivalence as generative creative forces.
Vicuña’s ephemeral sculptures, sometimes swept away by nature, act as offerings and reminders of ancestral knowledge. The workshop reflects on her call to “hear the ancient voices in a new way”, and consider how, or if, such questions engage with our own archives and help to embrace the potential for change, even in times of uncertainty.
Joyce Treasure is a multidisciplinary artist and independent researcher whose practice includes performance, painting, video, photography, costume, writing, and installation.
Joyce Treasure’s practice draws primarily from Black feminist thought, particularly Beverley Stoute’s theorisation of Black Rage, alongside an ongoing interest in Yoruba cosmology and Butoh. Her work proposes refusal as a reparative process, addressing impermanence, ancestral knowledge and the generative potential of fragments.
In many creative and collaborative spaces, there is an emphasis on joy as a condition of feminist resistance and survival. Her research sits in tension with this: she is interested in what gets foreclosed when joy becomes a requirement and grief, rage, and ambivalence are treated as problems to move through rather than as valid, generative modes in their own right. She is equally wary of processes being instrumentalised toward a legible positive outcome.
This workshop is part of LPS' Horizontal Practices programme.
Horizontal Practices is dedicated to promoting peer-to-peer learning and non-hierarchical spaces for conversation. These take form as discursive events, professional training and curated guest workshops.
Horizontal Practices responds to the need for and importance of space for experimental modes of exchange that sit outside the context of institutional ‘education’ frameworks. As with the rest of the LPS programme, queer and feminist practices and those which sit in-between visual art and theatre are at the core of Horizontal Practices.