GHost invites you to join us for Hostings 6 & 7 two evenings of interdisciplinary talks and presentations exploring the desire to materialise what is absent through the medium of haunted landscapes.
or by the manifesting of ghosts.
The talks are free, but space is limited please RSVP to [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> to reserve your place:
Hostings 6: Absence – Haunted Landscapes
Date: February 29th 2012, 6.30pm – 9.00pm
Venue: The Court Room, First Floor, Senate House, University of London
Map here: http://tinyurl.com/7d9wspq
Sharon Kivland, “Reisen: The limpid Waters of Mountain Lakes, The Snow on Alpine Peaks, The Smoke of Steam Trains”
Mark Fisher and Andy Sharp, "Bleak And Solemn... the hauntological landscapes of M.R. James"
Laura Joyce, “Haunted Idylls: Crime Scenes in Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' “
Hayley Lock, “Spoiling my pussies love time”
Hostings 7: Presence – Manifesting Ghosts
Date: March 14th 2012, 6.30pm – 9.00pm
Venue: The Court Room, First Floor, Senate House, University of London
Hollington & Kyprianou, “Technology & the Uncanny”
Jack Hunter, “Expressions of Spirithood”
John Sabol, “The Forgotten Soldier: Manifestations of the Continuing Presence of Colonel William Holmes (1862-2011)”
More information: http://www.host-a-ghost.blogspot.com/
Haunted Landscapes
Sharon Kivland - Reisen
Hostings 6: Absence – Haunted Landscapes, will commence with a screening of three very short films by Sharon Kivland titled, Reisen: The limped waters of mountain lakes, The snow on alpine peaks and The smoke of steam trains. The images in the films are photographs, from a series of works which the artist re-photographed from old postcards. The images also relate to two small pamphlets, entitled Reisen, which refer to the trains, train journeys, railway-lines, stations, station platforms, railway timetables, ticket collectors, and train compartments in the life and work of Sigmund Freud. Each film is subtitled ‘Every year Sigmund Freud went on holiday with his brother, Alexander’.
Sharon Kivland is an artist and writer and 'occasional curator' working in London and France. She holds a Masters in History of art, Goldsmiths College, University of London and a
Doctorate from The History of Art Department, University of Reading. She is a researcher at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London, and a Visiting Fellow at the IGRS, University of London. She has exhibited widely in Europe and North America and is represented by DomoBaal, London, Galerie Bugdahn & Kaimer, Düsseldorf, and Galerie des petits carreaux, Paris. Publications include Freud on Holiday volume III. The Forgetting of a Proper Name
co-published by Cube Art Editions, Athens, and information as material, York 2011 and A Case of Hysteria, Book Works, London, 1999.
Mark Fisher and Andy Sharp - Bleak And Solemn... the hauntological landscapes of M.R. James
We present our short film "Bleak And Solemn... the hauntological landscapes of M.R. James" - in which we provide an annotated exploration of real and cinematic locations in two of the author's ghost stories. This will be followed by a short talk discussing the desire to explore horror and ghost film locations. Does exploring such places allow us to enter a ludic and augmented reality? Can this give us access to a forgotten arena of energised play and creative fear, akin to childhood experience. Can we use the intersection of film and location to subvert Williams Burroughs' magical formula: "cut-up reality and the past leaks through"?
By overlaying celluloid and concrete recollections of haunted landscapes, can we create new imaginary films, in which we are the main spectres?
Mark Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism and the forthcoming Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. He teaches at the University of East London, Goldsmiths, University of London and the City Literary Institute. His writing regularly appears in Film Quarterly, The Wire, Sight&Sound and on his own weblog, k-punk.
Andy Sharp runs the English Heretic project - an organisation of the imaginative faculty, dedicated to unearthing, researching and speculating upon England's landscapes and tragic figures. Combining literary, audio and visual guides English Heretic have released numerous publications and recordings since 2003 including "The English Heretic Collection 1 and 2", "Wyrd Tales 1 and 2", "Tales Of The New Isis Lodge", "Your passport to the qliphoth" and "Plan for the assassination of Princess Anne". English Heretic also conduct public ceremonies, having recently appeared at "Past, Present and Future" festival at Wysing Arts Centre. Andy Sharp has also talked on a wide range of magical topics, most recently on "The Cult of Ku" at Treadwell's Bookshop. English Heretic have just published their latest book "Wyrd Tales 2", a 140 page illustrated anthology of speculative fiction.
Laura Joyce - Haunted Idylls: Crime Scenes in Ovid's 'Metamorphoses
Then he hastened with the frightened Philomela into most wild and silent solitudes of an old forest; where, concealed among deep thickets a forbidding old house stood…but even while her agonizing screams implored her sister's and her father's aid, and while she vainly called upon the Gods, he overmastered her with brutal force.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses contains several descriptions of sexual violence, torture, brutality and murder which take place in beautiful, idyllic settings. Often he introduces a sacred grotto, a lush spring, a secret grove, or a dark, impenetrable forest to set a scene. Within these sublime, numinous spaces, he contaminates the landscape with violence and degradation. The spaces continue to be haunted by the violence committed there, as the victims of the crimes do not disappear, but rather metamorphose into elements of the scene itself; from Myrrha’s agonising pregnancy trapped inside a tree, to the terrified Callisto, transformed into a bear, only to be hunted by her son. The quote above is taken from the episode of Tereus and Philomela, and describes the beginning of the brutal campaign of violence done to the girl, set in an ‘old forest’ among ‘deep thickets’, a sure sign that horror will ensue.
My paper will look briefly at the history of the locus amoenus or ‘pleasant place’ in classical poetry, and at the subversive use which Ovid makes of this trope. I will also be guided by Derrida’s essay ‘Hostipitality’ which looks at the etymological links between hostility and hospitality, and the ways in which this impacts on the disruption of the locus amoenus in Ovid. I will also look briefly at Henry Bond’s Lacanian work on crime scene photography, in order to delineate the psychotic nature of Ovid’s haunted spaces.
Laura Joyce is a DPhil student in Creative and Critical Writing at The University of Sussex. Her research is on body horror, necrophilia, murder and sado-masochistic violence, and the haunted spaces that these acts inhabit. Laura is writing a novella as part of her research, from the point of view of a group of murdered women, based on the femicides in Ciudad Juarez. Her first novel, about the killing of six year old beauty queen Jonbenet Ramsey, will be published in June 2012.
Hayley Lock - Spoiling my pussies love time
The ten lectures contained within John Ruskin’s ‘The Ethics of the Dust’ written in 1875 frames a dialogue between the girls of Winnington Hall in Cheshire and an elderly lecturer who references crystallography and scientific knowledge through dreams as a medium for teaching. Referencing Sinbad’s adventures from the tale of a Thousand and one nights, Ruskin describes these haunted landscapes in an effort to educate the young ladies before him about the moralistic complexities embedded in human culture through scientific enquiry, structure and order.
Using the titles of each lecture, I propose to create ten pieces of work, each of which contain a landscape from each chapter. The chapters are: The Valley of Diamonds, The Pyramid Builders, The Crystal Life, The Crystal Orders, Crystal Virtues, Crystal Quarrels, Home Virtues, Crystal Caprice, Crystal Sorrows and The Crystal Rest. I propose to show these works as a Ruskin lecture.
Each landscape will be placed within a recreation of a Claude Glass, a tourist drawing tool or a black glass that Ruskin was said to loathe for its inaccuracies, favouring instead the magnifying glass for fine detailing.
These Claude Glass visions haunted Ruskin in his imaginings through a series of mental breakdowns that occurred firstly in 1871 at a time of great stress with his mother’s death and his close cousins marriage (Ruskin later apologises in a series of letters to his cousin Joan for spoiling his pussies love time) and they continue to his death in 1900. Ruskin’s illnesses have since been recognised to fall at a point of loss when these dark imaginings muddled truth and reality with confusion and sorrow.
Ruskin attempted to throw away these black glasses into Coniston Water and as well as on his travels to Europe but on each occasion they were returned by Joan.
Hayley Lock studied at Goldsmith’s College, London and currently lives and works in Suffolk and Cambridge. Her practice straddles fact and fiction, truth and the fake. Weaving new narratives of history and myth through a complicated and sometimes mysterious tale of heartache, lust and delusional thinking, Lock allows her practice to accumulate, take unfathomable journeys and elicit deceit to create part encrypted biography and part parallel histories through drawing, collage, sculpture and sound. Previous exhibitions include These Living Walls of Jet, Ceri hand Gallery, London; Future 50, Project Space Leeds and To Taste Molten Diamonds, Backlit Studios, Nottingham. In 2011 and 2012 Lock reinvented new histories in historic places with her project (Now that would be) Telling which travelled to Ickworth House, Suffolk, Brantwood House, Cumbria, Dr Johnsons House, London, A La Ronde, Devon and Caddington Hall in London.
Manifesting Ghosts
PROGRAMME FOR HOSTINGS 7
Hollington & Kyprianou -Technology & the Uncanny, LCC - EVA, London
Far from empirical science and technological progress dampening the enthusiasm for magical or spiritual readings, the use and improvement of technology trades on the same sense of awe and the uncanny previously provided by mystical phenomena. The symbiotic relationship between technology and the uncanny is not only one of a shared notion of the sublime, but also one of appropriation.
This paper will discuss the relationship between technology and the uncanny through historical and contemporary examples as well as referencing our own collaborative artist practice.
Hollington and Kyprianou are London based artists who have been collaborating for over ten years.
Their work investigates how competing representations of science and politics shape the boundaries of debate and the locus of the rational. Their materials are drawn from archives of primary objects, scenarios from film and mainstream culture, oral history, interviews and hearsay to create new narrative spaces that are simultaneously funny and un-nerving. Their work as been shown widely in the UK including Tate Modern and ICA London and internationally at The 51st Venice Biennale, as well as in Europe, North and South America and Australia.
Their latest project, a time travel murder mystery can be seen here:
http://www.electronicsunset.org/node/1813
Jack Hunter - Expressions of Spirithood
The body is the primary tool for the expression of personality. It is our interface with the physical world and our everyday means of communicating with each other, both verbally and non-verbally. The way in which we use our bodies, therefore, is of key importance to the way we are perceived as individual personalities. In trance mediumship, and spirit possession, practices the human body is used for the expression of multiple personalities and non-physical entities. This paper will explore the differing ways in which the human body is utilised as a means for the expression of spirits in a variety of different cultural contexts, from the ecstatic dancing of Afro-Brazilian Candomble mediums to the relatively static demonstrations of Euro-American trance mediums. It will explore the different methods employed by mediums to signify the presence of spirits and will examine the role of performance in making the spirit world tangible. These techniques will be contrasted with the methods of contemporary ghost hunters (i.e. the use of electronic equipment to infer the presence of spirits), and will address the similarities and differences in the ways in which the presence of spirits is recognised during trance demonstrations and modern ghost hunts. All of this will be presented with the aim of furthering our understanding of the nature of spirits and their culturally specified modes of expression in the physical world.
Jack Hunter is a PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Bristol, UK. His research looks at contemporary trance mediumship in Bristol, and focuses on themes of personhood, personality, altered states of consciousness and anomalous experience. He is the founder and editor of "Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal.” In 2010 he received the Eileen J. Garrett scholarship from the Parapsychology Foundation, and in 2011 was awarded the Gertrude Schmeidler award by the Parapsychological Association.
http://paranthropology.weebly.com/index.html
John Sabol - The Forgotten Soldier: Manifestations of the Continuing Presence of Colonel William Holmes (1862-2011)
What occurs at a location perceived to be haunted, who continues to manifest years, even centuries, after physical death and why? Avery Gordon, in her book Ghostly Matters (1996), states that the ghost is a social figure, and one who manifests as one form by which something lost or forgotten makes itself known. A haunting, according to Gordon, is a very particular way of knowing what has happened and what continues.. So much has already been lost, forgotten or destroyed in the accelerated pace of contemporary life and technological advancement. Yet, it is this same technology that may write that forgotten history and tell, with voices echoing from the past, individual ghost stories.
The battle of Antietam, September 17th 1862, was the single bloodiest day of combat in American History. Colonel William Holmes of the 2nd Georgia became the last soldier to die in combat here at Burnside Bridge. Holmes' story had become lost to history and his burial site near the bridge was undiscovered until our “ghost excavations” there in 2010/2011. Through contextual scenarios, enacted by our female investigators and RT-EVP audio recordings, the postscript to his death emerges as auditory manifestations of a plea to “go home” to Georgia and be properly buried. His voiced responses haunt us still today, 150 years after his remains were lost to history.
John Sabol is an archaeologist, cultural anthropologist, actor, and “ghost excavator”. He has a M.A. in Anthropology/archaeology (University of Tennessee), and a B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology (Bloomsburg University). As an archaeologist, he has worked on excavations and site surveys in England, Mexico, and at various sites in the United States. His anthropological fieldwork includes the studies of “ghosts” and native religious beliefs in the afterlife among various groups in Mexico. His acting career includes “ghosting” performances of various characters and scenarios in more than 35 movies, TV shows, and documentaries. He has conducted “ghost excavations” (an archaeological-ethnographic-theatrical approach embodied in the P.O.P. Theory) in the USA and Europe. He has appeared in the A&E TV series, Paranormal State as an investigative consultant. Publications include, Ghost Excavator (2007), Ghost Culture (2007), Digging Up Ghosts (2011), and the Haunted Theatre (2011).
www.ghostexcavation.com<http://www.ghostexcavation.com/>
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