Schizo-Culture: Cracks In The Street
SPACE
03 Oct - 07 Dec 2014
Cracks in the state of things, in the state of places, in the state of norms… Cracks leading us despite ourselves to new social practices and to new aesthetic practices which will reveal themselves as less and less separate from each other and more and more in complicity…
- Felix Guattari, Cracks in the Street, Flash Art, 1987
SPACE is proud to present an exhibition and event series taking the seminal 1975 event: Schizo-Culture: On Prisons and Madness as its point of departure. Reengaging with the myriad cultural connections and fractures the original event exposed, the project will feature an expanded and speculative schizo-cultural archive alongside a series of new artistic commissions, screenings, performances and public discussions.
Organised by the early Semiotext(e) group – then comprising Sylvère Lotringer and John Rajchman – whose mission statement was to ‘bring together two continents of thought through a revolution of desire,’ the 1975 Schizo Culture conference saw counter-cultural icons such as John Cage, William S. Burroughs, R.D. Laing and Ti-Grace Atkinson come head to head with figures now regarded as some of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century: Michel Foucault, Jean Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.
Cracks in the Street will feature new exhibition and performance commissions by Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson (Terminal Beach), Sidsel Meineche Hansen, and Susan Stenger, alongside recordings and ephemera from the original 1975 event and the Semiotext(e) archive (courtesy of Fales Library and Special Collections, New York), and additional contributions from, amongst others, William Burroughs, Plastique Fantastique (a collaboration between David Burrows & Simon O'Sullivan and others), Vivienne Dick, Orphan Drift, Hedi El Kholti and Sylvère Lotringer.
The project will culminate on December 12-14 with a closing weekend of performances, screenings, live music and discussion addressing many of the socio-political subjects schizo-culture engages with (anti-psychiatry, disciplinary rationalities, philosophy and language). Full details of this event to follow.
Curated by David Morris and Katherine Waugh in collaboration with Paul Pieroni/SPACE
