Cally Spooner. Offshore in Kingston

About

The public are invited to join OFFSHORE’s activities at Stanley Picker Gallery at different moments in the day on Monday 23, Tuesday 24 and Thursday 26 April. A detailed schedule will be published here ahead of the launch.

“Arriving from literature, theatre and a messy, unrequited love affair with Philosophy, OFFSHORE scripts fictional structures to let real life (non-fiction) in,” says Spooner. “It sits somewhere between a philosophy school for embodied knowledge, an engine, an alibi, a backroom, a rehearsal and some deliberate, unguaranteed, social plumbing.” 

Over the past eighteen months, Spooner organised five trans-disciplinary gatherings with near fifty performers, writers, artists and thinkers – including from Kingston’s Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) – that laid the groundwork of OFFSHORE. The gatherings researched the labour of maintenance, transactions in Human Resources and use of living tools as well as the dynamics and discontents of the social body in relation to the standardisation and quantification of language or life. Coincidentally, OFFSHORE formed as a group of core cast to draft new vocabulary and terms of how to organise, work and perform.

Departing from the ‘business ontology’ of a present-day financial, corporate or neoliberal mindset, OFFSHORE operates through theoretical and fictional modes that are always just a few, critical, steps removed from reality. Through scores, rotas, soundtracks, written and spoken language, the project opens up new working codes between paper, text and bodies – spaces in which simultaneities and differences between concepts, persons and objects play out in part-scripted, part-improvisational ways. Presenting what has happened throughout the fellowship, OFFSHORE IN KINGSTON gathers core cast to rehearse, archive and display their performance repertoire and research.