Altai in Residence: SALT. Magazine - The Furies

About

The Furies, the female deities of vengeance, are never fixed in form, changing from crones to insects to bad weather. Throughout the evening the Furies will act as a entry point into discussions of contemporary embodiment and rage. Contributors include Jessica Worden, Dyveke Bredsdorff and the collective Erinyes.

Dyveke Bredsdorff is currently studying for a Masters at the Slade. Dyveke works within sound, video, text, printmaking, drawing and sculpture.

Erinyes is a collective of women artists investigating a range of aspects of sound in relation to space, atmosphere and absence of the image. Erinyes acts as a platform to bring together artists to explore multi-vocality, rhythm, time, formal and informal speech, narrative and noise, used both as material and inspiration. Current contributors are Jenna Bliss, Jenna Collins, Marina Elderton, Hannah Catherine Jones, Adrianna Palazzolo, Diana Policarpo, Cara Tolmie, Nicola Woodham (UK, USA, CA, PT) more 

Jessica Worden is an artist and writer who works across disciplines, combining poetics, image-based media and sound in publications and live performance. She explores overlaps in pleasure, trauma and historical lore from a queer feminist perspective and considers how these impact perceptions of precarity, femininity and mental health. 

Altai in Residence; Experiments in Collective Practice is a residency at the Royal College of Art for the group Altai, invited by curator Anne Duffau (a---z). Altai are four women artists; Verity Birt, Keira Greene, Sara Hibbert and Genevieve Lutkin who are hosting a programme of encounters, which test modes of knowledge and pedagogic alternatives at odds with the institution and aligned with practices altogether more inclusive, intimate and mystic. 

“Impoverishment of the public university in order to later transform it in a corporate manner is orientating the knowledge it produces solely to the market. Everything outside of this trend is rapidly neglected and depreciated."- Silvia Federici 

In the wake of the Brexit vote, the future is uncertain for young people; facing the impact of the financial crash, austerity, and tuition fee hikes. With a promised future proven a lie, 'millennials' face expanding costs of living alongside diminishing opportunities. However, in response to these challenges there has been a growth of self-initiated education systems; research groups, collaborative practice and skill-swapping ecologies, enabling many artists to bypass traditional routes, whilst continuing research within a free, rhizomatic knowledge exchange. 

Excavating and mobilising knowledges from the edges of history is where our particular interests lie. Gleaned from the fragments left of patriarchal suppression and neglect, these knowledges embody ancient practices, which intimately share and nurture in a cyclical relation of exchange, at odds with the hierarchical education system. Crucially, these relations gain particular momentum when operating – as parasite – within an institutional context, in order to rupture and subvert it. But as well as agitating, these more intimate and embodied knowledges can envelope and mesh with academic and critical thinking, producing a more wholesome engaged practice. As collective, we will infiltrate our host – the RCA – to activate these knowledges and in-turn, offer ourselves as host to external knowledge bodies. This will be a cyclical exercise in practicing and performing knowledge exchange, with an aim to generate new sustainable knowledge composites.