NAC member Phoebe Beckett Chingono reflects on Angel Zinovieff’s UKG Cosmology Performance + Dance Party, which took place at SDS on Friday 26 July 2024 as part of Artist Archive. All photography taken by Jemima Yong.
We banded together, the listeners, to catch Angel’s speech. A new artwork. Experimental–they used a bluetooth microphone. Where are we?
We are on St. George’s road. We are living on a star as a place. SE1.
This question of contextualisation implies recontextualisation.
*
Was a ballot cast? A yay, or nay.
Angel led the way. Up the industrial steel staircase. Perched at some point, dangling over the rail, legs hanging loose. They played the harmonica.
It looked precarious. This is where the microphone fails.
*
Back to the beginning. “The beginning.” So they named it.
And you can’t always go around naming the act you’re engaging in like this.
Angel began by locating themselves. Address. Postcode.
These aren’t true-or-false statements, like “It’s raining outside.” What Angel denotes, in their public address, goes beyond the propositional.
They say this–we feel–because of a need to locate themselves in space. Expressing a sense of not being in the same place, of not sharing an experience, an understanding of what is happening.
*
The next part of the tour–of the exhibition–now, if it’s any use to you.
In their speech, they talk about when they had a hard time getting up. In the morning. Social media. Various thoughts. A plan to grow out their hair.
Angel points at a black-and-white grid of portraits. Recognisable figures.
David Lang. The psychiatrist who questioned whether society had the right to proclaim itself sane and others mad.
Next to Jade Goody. A victim of reality TV. Entertainment, ridicule. Then, of course, she passed away. Cervical cancer, I think. Yes, cervical. Or something like it.
Bush and Blair shaking hands. Probably 2003. Angel mentions the campaign, the Iraq War. Anti-war protests. That was a point on their timeline.
Trisha. A friend, I think. Something about Crystal Palace and raving days.
And a doctor’s waiting room. Seasickness, Angel says.
They hang their head. Hands on their face, face in their hands. I know there’s a diagnosis. Something failing. Health.
I get you, I thought. I have points of clarity, here and there. But often, it’s murky. There’s a fog. Like brain fog.
My mum’s mother died of an autoimmune condition, we think–details are suspicious. “If this isn’t true”, she said,”I will eat my hat”. My mum also has one, I think I do too.
Father’s pass down inheritances. We’ve been passing fog down.
*
So, I meant to say–back when Angel was talking about a prehistoric. Urm. A prehistoric organism.
In the reception foyer was Siin. Her face, glazed open–a receptacle. Head tips, cheek on the wall, slumps by a metal lattice. Withheld.
Angel rises from the foetal position. Their face a sallow glistening complexion. Pensive expression, shadows under eyes–but the eyes themselves are extremely bright.
Siin raises a hand in the air, forms a triangular, elongated shape with it. It contracts. Opens and closes.
Ages ago, what is now pulsing in Angel’s chest was pulsing in the sea.
Heart swells, heart keeps time, the squid swells, the squid is a heart, time is a squid. I’m going to have to stop for a minute, I don’t know what I’m saying here.
***
It is cosmology, rave and performance.
Endearing flow over tracksuits, limbs, human, heart, face, spine, tipping, tender, lifted, raised, chair legs, legs in air.
Cosmology is: entities considered to be in the universe. It is also the symbolically constituted differentiations between entities considered to be in the universe–such as ideas, things, relations, persons.
I had come there. You had gone there.
What do cosmologies do?
I give my hands to your head. A wedge between. I pull myself in, our sides perfectly side-by-side. Legs…
…open. Now that I have your weight I can guide you. Arms cradle your head–a gesture, then an actual cradle. You lean over me. Inside the concave of your chest…
They encompass. As local schemes supersede temporal changes, as newness acquires symbolic coherence.
…we form a mass. Raising my hip elevates you. Searching for space within contact. I turn, bend you over my leg, let you hang there.
Your tailbone points to the sky, my arm rests there.
Garage as cosmology refers to the process of new technological forces realised in cultural logics.
A lurch. A direction. Hands meet the ground behind your coccyx. Now kneeling, I curl into your side. And slowly uncurl. Head pivots, a compass. We come to standing and we wait a few moments and then…
…I jump onto your back.
And we piggyback away.
Into an elevator.
We touch bass.
Where is the rave?
…not next Wednesday…not twenty years ago. It is an intermediate situation underway. A crowd has formed that knows not yet its direction. Simply, a cosmology initiates as the crowd’s experience of itself. These things tend to have tipping points.
Tipping, what is tipping?
There doesn’t have to be a majority. It can start small. A black-point, an area where people are most dense.
A point, a line or a smudge? A rise and fall.
What does performance do?
The same. The tipping point of a rave is a performance. Performance has a highly non-localised configuration. It can spread and be across events in time. It shapes an utterance that creates effects by citing itself as a source. The citation can split from the singular event and travel making this self-referencing performative utterance so powerful.
And so, cosmology is a change encompassed by a local logic.
Though that local logic shouldn’t be presumed to already be there. It is, yet, the intellectual repertoires elaborated by people in the present to make sense of the new thing. Many logics fail.
Is performance non-local?
Performance is a singular event, its effects happen in a localised context. And, yet it only works if it can reach beyond itself and bring in some sense of a meta structure.
I ran outside, past moving traffic.
You don’t know I’m there.
We play on a road island. You hide behind a tree. I lie down.
We are on St. George’s Road.
We are in London, I do know this.
We are living on a star as place.
Writing by Phoebe Beckett Chingono. Commissioned by Siobhan Davies Studios.
Find Phobe on Instagram @zvicha_.
All photos from Jemima Yong.