BEEF & Cryptic present – Ela Orleans, Sophia Loizou and Laura Phillips. An evening of audiovisual explorations and speculations into underexplored and unknown territories.
Glasgow and Paris based Polish composer and audio-visual artist Ela Orleans performs her mesmerising Night Voyager. Set to soaring music featuring live synthesiser, theremin, vocals and violin, Night Voyager features NASA archive footage of the 1969 Apollo moon mission, matching the astronauts’ emotional journey with fragments of Night Thoughts a collection of extended poetic mediations written by Edward Young in 1742.. Rather than a linear re-telling, Orleans performance focuses on the wider meaning of the lunar trip and Young’s exploration of mortality, time and human folly. Although now scarcely remembered, Night Thoughts was called in its time ‘the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced’.
Based on her sonic fiction A Tellurian Memorandum, Sophia Loizou’s live audiovisual piece Hydro~ explores liquid sonic ecologies. Drawing from a combination of deep sea archival and aerial drone footage captured on her research expedition to Iceland, Loizou presents water as a startling figure of radically open disposition; a non-homogenised, alien biotechnology whose multivalent characteristics traverse form and species boundaries.
BEEF artist, Laura Phillips’ film Beneath The Mead: cigar.lend.shave is a speculative portrait of a place in North Bristol called Pen Park Hole. As in the pastime of caving, the film channels the intense curiosity to seek out what lies beneath the land we occupy. Combining the real and the imaginary – Phillips’ film questions what is known about this specific site and ideas of locality and home.
