Reaching across time zones and geographical regions, artist in residence Angela YT Chan and curator Annie Jael Kwan, have co-created an experimental audio work that explores their shared fascination with liquidity.The piece weaves field sound recordings and research into water scarcity and embedded power structures in cultural narratives to examine rising waters and eco-anxiety alongside strategies of hydrofeminism and radical solidarity across borders.This work is made possible by funding from, and is part of, a wider research project funded by the European Union, called Artsformation. Artsformation has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation strand.Angela YT Chan was awarded the Jerwood Arts / FACT Digital Fellowship in 2020. Funded by Jerwood Arts, the annual fellowship and remote residency appoints 3 emerging artists, curators, creative technologists, critical thinkers or cultural activists, from any background, to support their potential as producers of the future.

FACT

Episode 4: In both trickles and floods

For Framework for Trust, artist in residency Tessa Norton and artist Shonagh Short have produced a podcast by exchanging voice notes. Their unfolding conversation considers how questions of trust are important to their practice, and asks how learning to trust can offer solutions or create problems. Are artists trusted, or indeed trustworthy?Shonagh Short is a socially engaged artist based in Bolton, Greater Manchester. They make participatory, playful work that uses language in its widest sense, including metaphor and everyday visual language, as a lens to explore class, gender and society. Aesthetically they are influenced by their working-class background, utilising everyday items as materials in order to unpick preconceived notions and distinctions between high and low art, cultural value and societal status. They use humour as a site of resistance from which structural inequalities can be made visible.Tessa Norton is a writer and artist based in West Yorkshire. Her work spans text, publications, performance and events, playfully exploring cosmic and expansive worlds using unlikely theoretical frameworks, like pop music, teen movies and ghost stories. Her publication The Fields Here Are Full of Ghosts was published by Wysing Polyphonic in 2019 and featured in Wysing Arts Centre’s 30th anniversary exhibition, All His Ghosts Must Do My Bidding. Her writing has appeared in Tribune, The Wire, Doggerland, The Bad Vibes Club Reader, Corridor 8, LAUGH, Hoax and Art LicksThis podcast is made possible by funding from, and is part of, a wider research project funded by the European Union, called Artsformation. Artsformation has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation strand.Commissioned by FACT, Rituals of Loneliness is produced as part of Young at Art, a participatory arts programme that brings socially engaged arts and creative projects to the older population across the Liverpool Region. It is a partnership between FACT, Open Eye Gallery and National Museums Liverpool and funded by Arts Council England and The Baring Foundation.

Episode 3: I’ve got the power!

In light of the rise in popularity of audio communication such as voice note, immersive narrative podcasts and Club House, Ebun Sodipo and Keiken have collaborated to create an audio piece that invites you on a journey: offering a full-body experience through your imagination.The piece explores voice, tone, stories and sound as different modes of audio communication to create our own fleeting and invisible mode of communication and question, where does trust begin?

Episode 2: Three Generations in One Fleshy Body

In this podcast, artist in residence Yambe Tam delivers a guided meditation of her new work Deep Dive (2021). Using sensory and creative technologies, Yambe Tam's work explores the evolution of consciousness in living and artificial beings.The artwork explores the connection between human presence of mind, and the uncertainty of the natural world, following the journey of a whale falling from the surface of the ocean to the seabed. Tracing memories from birth to the construction of a mature identity, to death and the afterlife, the aural prompts connect between and blur human and non-human perceptions. The meditation encourages an inner journey of self-understanding, inviting you to surrender and find comfort in the unfamiliar.Deep Dive (2021) is exhibiting at FACT until 3 October as part of Uncertain Data.

Episode 1: Meditation for a Falling Whale (and other social animals)

Black Obsidian Sound System: Lisa Amanda Palmer with Nzinger Sounds is the second of two episodes of podcasts produced by Sable Radio with FACT and Liverpool Biennial to accompany the exhibition ‘The Only Good System is a Sound System’ by artist collective Black Obsidian Sound System. This episode is a conversation between writer and Deputy Director of the Stephen Lawrence Foundation, Lisa Amanda Palmer, and veteran DJ duo Nzinga Sounds, as they talk about their formation, experiences of being Black women in sound system culture, and their role in the wider Black arts movement in the eighties and nineties. For more information about FACT’s programme, head to fact.co.uk

Episode 2: Black Obsidian Sound System: Lisa Amanda Palmer with Nzinger Sounds

Black Obsidian Sound System: In Focus with TYGAPAW is the first of two episodes of podcasts produced by Sable Radio with FACT and Liverpool Biennial to accompany the exhibition ‘The Only Good System is a Sound System’ by artist collective Black Obsidian Sound System. The exhibition can be seen at FACT from 19 May until 28 August 2021.This episode is a conversation between DJ, Curator and Producer TYGAPAW and B.O.S.S. member, writer and filmmaker Deborah Findlater. Stay tuned for the second episode of this podcast, coming soon. You can keep up with B.O.S.S.’ work here and TYGAPAW's here. For more information about FACT’s programme, head to fact.co.ukCommissioned by Liverpool Biennial for the 11th edition, The Stomach and the Port, curated by Manuela Moscoso.

Episode 1: Black Obsidian Sound System: In Focus with TYGAPAW

Framework for Resilience is a three-part series of online conversations which bring together activists, artists, researchers and educators to think about the world we are creating, the world we are destroying, the systems which will fall, and those which should prevail. In this third and final episode of the series, we discuss migration and adaptation. Host Kayt Hughes (Public Programme Producer at FACT) and mediator Maitreyi Maheshwari (Head of Programme at FACT) and joined by speakers Dr. Ali Meghji (Lecturer, Researcher), Jessica El Mal (Artist) and Niloo Sharifi (Multidisciplinary Artist).In 1990, the United Nations anticipated that ‘the greatest single impact of climate change could be on human migration’ with estimates predicting 200 million ‘climate refugees’ by 2050. While the scientific case for human-caused climate change has gained more certainty, the consequences for populations affected both by meteorological and political factors remain unpredictable. The disparity between countries and populations that had been a legacy of colonialism is becoming more pronounced as the effects of climate change are not contained within the borders of any single country.Whether motivated by need, opportunity or force, human mobility has been an inherent part of the human experience for millennia. As people move and adapt to new environments, how is our sense of self affected by the perspectives offered by distance away from a ‘home’ and across settled generations? Our sense of self is often located in ideas of place and narratives drawn from history and biology, creating a tension between our desire to assimilate and belong somewhere or to preserve our origins. How might digital spaces create alternative definitions of community and identities shaped by more fluid notions of belonging? And how can new technologies allow us to adapt to changing ecological conditions?The reading list for this conversation can be found here.------ABOUT FRAMEWORK FOR RESILIENCEThis online conversation is part of The Living Planet, FACT’s year-long season which focuses on the non-human, and deals with themes such as climate change, ecology and communication, as well as the violence of ‘othering’. This series will inform our programme for the rest of the year which focuses on systems of knowledge and classification in the formation of identity and the exercise of power. They also form part of Artsformation, a research project which seeks to identify new ways of working, specifically at the intersection between art, society and technology, to overcome current social crises including justice, democracy and climate. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.The title for these sessions is taken from the artwork, PESTS, by Shonagh Short. Commissioned by FACT in 2020 for FACT Together.ABOUT DR. ALI MEGHJIDr Ali Meghji is a Lecturer in Social Inequalities in the department of sociology, Cambridge. He is the director for the MPhil in marginality and exclusion, the course organiser for SOC12 Empire, colonialism, imperialism, and the chair of 'Decolonising sociology’. Currently, Ali’s predominant research interests lie in bridging the epistemological, methodological, and empirical divergences between critical race theory and decolonial thought. Through this research, Ali intends to balance the study of national racialised social systems with the global process of coloniality.ABOUT JESSICA EL MALJessica El Mal is an English-Moroccan creative dedicated to valuing time, care and human connection in everything she works on. With a particular interest in ecology and migration, her work is both deeply personal and yet draws on the universality of the human experience through a balance of digital techniques, aesthetics and interaction. The work tends to address global structures of power through critical research, multidisciplinary projects, and speculative future imaginaries often centered around collaboration, co-curation and collective knowledge systems. Her current project ‘The Digital Forest’ commissioned by Signal Film and Media, Grizedale Arts and The Forestry Commission, explores how the online space can open up opportunities for sensory experiences of nature for black and brown communities. She also runs an art and nature group for migrant, asylum seeker and refugee artists called ‘This Garden Group’ which consists of workshops in a range of natural spaces, a peer support group and a public facing program to critique the role of botany in colonialism. Jessica's most recent exhibition Grounds for Concern exhibited at MAMA Rotterdam, challenged the authority of man-made borders through a digital installation and workshops, and her FACT Together digital commission has just gone live (see www.visionsofafuture.com). Previous projects have been with Manchester International Festival and Journey’s Festival International, as well as many collaborations with non-arts organisations such as the Collegium for Language in a Changing Society, Let’s Keep Growing Longsite, Furness Refugee Support.ABOUT NILOO SHARIFINiloo Sharifi is a multidisciplinary artist from Liverpool, making collaborative works that facilitate polyphony. Her most recent work is the-magic-tree.co.uk, a digital piece that transforms by merging with pictures uploaded by visitors. The idea is to see what emerges when you let everyone speak; the same ethos informed the curation of the Liverpool chapter of the Goethe Institut’s Arrival City.

Episode 3: Framework for Resilience - Migration and Adaptation

Framework for Resilience is a three-part series of online conversations which bring together activists, artists, researchers and educators to think about the world we are creating, the world we are destroying, the systems which will fall, and those which should prevail.In this second episode of the series, we start from a collection of questions of how we engage with time, land and ownership: What happens if we consider that the very earth and trees, as well as non-sentient beings like AI and stones, have rights? How can we understand time and consequence differently: understanding that indigenous deaths caused climate change in 1600, and prevent the repeating of history? How do we peacefully transform a racialised colonial system which values the very commodities which are destroying lives, bodies, and lands?Episode host Dr. Nicola Triscott (Director/CEO of FACT) and mediator Helen Starr (Curator), and gathered speakers Jack Tan (Artist), Himali Singh Soin (Writer, Artist) and Nabil Ahmed (Artist, Educator), consider how Western principles do not allow for ethical collaboration between beings, focusing rather on exploitation and one-sided gains. They instead explore how indigenous approaches might influence the way we establish ideas of kinship, and open up our sense of community to include other forms of existence, particularly in the future. If we approach the world with a different sense of time, and with empathy for all modes of existence, we might be able to create new forms of collaboration and notions of belonging.The reading list for this conversation can be found here.------ABOUT FRAMEWORK FOR RESILIENCEThis online conversation is part of The Living Planet, FACT’s year-long season which focuses on the non-human, and deals with themes such as climate change, ecology and communication, as well as the violence of ‘othering’. This series will inform our programme for the rest of the year which focuses on systems of knowledge and classification in the formation of identity and the exercise of power. They also form part of Artsformation, a research project which seeks to identify new ways of working, specifically at the intersection between art, society and technology, to overcome current social crises including justice, democracy and climate. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.The title for these sessions is taken from the artwork, PESTS, by Shonagh Short. Commissioned by FACT in 2020 for FACT Together.ABOUT HELEN STARRHelen is an Afro-Carib curator, producer and cultural activist from Trinidad, WI. She began curating exhibitions with artists such as Susan Hillier, Cindy Sherman and Marcel Duchamp in 1995. Helen founded The Mechatronic Library in 2010, to give marginalised artists access to technologies such as Game Engines, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR). Helen has worked with many public institutions such as Wysing Art Centre, FACT, Liverpool and QUAD in Derby.Being Indigenous-American Helen is interested in how digital artforms transform our understanding of reality by world-building narratives through storytelling and counter-storytelling. How, by “naming one’s own reality” we can experience the Other.Helen has commissioned projects from artists such as Rebecca Allen, Danielle Braithewaite-Shirley, Anna Bunting-Branch, Megan Broadmeadow, Aliyah Hussain and Salma Noor. Helen believes that speculative artworks can give a glimpse of a future filled with hope. Helen is on the board of QUAD, Derby and in 2020 she co-founded DAAD Futurism with Amrita Dhallu and Salma Noor.ABOUT JACK TANJack uses law, social norms and customs as a way of making art. He creates performances, sculpture and participatory projects that highlight the rules that guide human behaviour. Jack trained as a lawyer and worked in civil rights NGOs before becoming an artist. His Ph.D research explored legal aesthetics and performance and he co-edits the Art/Law Journal. Recent projects include Four Legs Good (2018) a revival of the medieval animal trials for Compass Festival Leeds and V&A London; his Singapore Biennale presentation Voices From The Courts examining the vocality of the State Courts of Singapore (2016), Law’s Imagination (2016) a curatorial residency at arebyte exploring legal aesthetics; his solo exhibition How to do things with rules (2015) at the ICA Singapore; and Closure (2012), a year-long residency and exhibition at the UK Department for Health looking at the liquidation of their social work quango. Jack has also taught sculpture at the Royal College of Art and University of Brighton, and politics at Goldsmiths.ABOUT HIMALI SINGH SOINHimali is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance and intimacy. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss, and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love. Her speculations are performed in audio-visual, immersive environments. Her almanac ‘we are opposite like that’, comprises missing paraphernalia from polar archives, false philosophies, unreliable observations from the ship, love letters, ekphrastic poems, and made-up maps. It marks the culmination of the eponymous interconnected body of work (since 2017) exploring the uninhabited parts of the Arctic and Antarctic circles from the perspective of ice, and its uncanny bearing on the rest of the world.ABOUT NABIL AHMEDNabil Ahmed is a transdisciplinary scholar and writer. He leads INTERPRT, an environmental justice project that investigates and advocates for the criminalisation of ecocide under international law. INTERPRT’s long term research has been exhibited most recently at the Warsaw Biennale/The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Beirut Arts Centre and The Museon museum for science and culture in The Hague. He has written for Third Text, Candide: Journal for Architectural Knowledge, MIT Press, Routledge, Documenta, Volume magazine, Sternberg Press, Mousse Publishing, Scientific Reports, Archeological and Environmental Forensic Science, among others. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture He has taught and lectured extensively in the UK and internationally.

Episode 2: Framework for Resilience - Climate Justice from De-colonialist Perspectives

Framework for Resilience is a three-part series of online conversations which bring together activists, artists, researchers and educators to think about the world we are creating, the world we are destroying, the systems which will fall, and those which should prevail.In this first episode of the series, we focus on the dismissive and destructive ways colonial powers have overtaken the natural world, extending the same attitudes to those who call these spaces home. Foregrounding the importance of empathy and practices of care, we discuss the effects of taking a more mindful and generous approach to the places we live, and our neighbours. Reframing our role as one of caretakers (of culture, the planet, one another), and encouraging positive action and education, we can begin to see the way to a more inclusive form of co-existence.This episode is hosted by Lesley Taker (Exhibitions Manager at FACT), mediated by Dr. Luiza Prado de O Martins (Artist, Researcher) who are joined by Dr. Edna Bonhomme (Historian, Writer, Interdisciplinary Artist), Céline Semaan-Vernon (Founder of Slow Factory Foundation, Designer, Writer, Activist) and Shonagh Short (Artist, Socially Engaged Practice).The reading list for this conversation can be found here.------ABOUT FRAMEWORK FOR RESILIENCEThis online conversation is part of The Living Planet, FACT’s year-long season which focuses on the non-human, and deals with themes such as climate change, ecology and communication, as well as the violence of ‘othering’. This series will inform our programme for the rest of the year which focuses on systems of knowledge and classification in the formation of identity and the exercise of power. They also form part of Artsformation, a research project which seeks to identify new ways of working, specifically at the intersection between art, society and technology, to overcome current social crises including justice, democracy and climate. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.The title for these sessions is taken from the artwork, PESTS, by Shonagh Short. Commissioned by FACT in 2020 for FACT Together.ABOUT DR LUIZA PRADO DE O MARTINDr. Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist and researcher whose work examines themes around fertility, reproduction, coloniality, gender, and race. We invited Luiza to mediate the discussion for her extensive speaking experience, and doctoral research interests. In 2019, she was selected as the recipient of the Vilém Flusser Residency for Artistic Research with her project “The Councils of the Pluriversal: Affective Temporalities of Reproduction and Climate Change.” She was also, in 2019, the recipient of the first Dieter Rückhaberle Förderpreis, awarded by the Künstlerhof Frohnau. She is a founding member of Decolonising Design.ABOUT DR EDNA BONHOMMEDr Edna Bonhomme is a writer, historian of science, and cultural worker. She holds a PhD in the History of Science from Princeton University and a Master’s in Public Health from Columbia University. As a researcher, Edna’s work interrogates the archaeology of (post)colonial science, embodiment, and surveillance. A central question of her work asks: What makes people sick? She answers this by exploring the spaces and modalities of care and toxicity that shape the possibility for repair. Edna's creative work is guided by decoloniality, care, and African diaspora world making. She has collaborated on and exhibited multimedia projects at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Galerie im Turm, Display Gallery, Savvy Contemporary, and other interdisciplinary spaces. Edna has written for publications such as Africa is a Country, Al Jazeera, analyse & kritik, The Baffler, Der Freitag, The Nation, The New Republic and more.ABOUT CÉLINE SEMAAN-VERNONCéline Semaan-Vernon is a Lebanese-Canadian designer, writer, advocate and public speaker. She is the founder of Slow Factory Foundation, a 501c3 public service organization working at the intersection of environmental and social justice, which produces a conference series promoting sustainability literacy called Study Hall, and the first science-driven incubator in fashion called One X One. She is on the Council of Progressive International, became a Director's Fellow of MIT Media Lab in 2016, and served on the Board of Directors of AIGA NY, a nonprofit membership organization that helps cultivate the future of design in New York City from 2016-2017.ABOUT SHONAGH SHORTShonagh Short is a socially engaged artist based in Bolton, Greater Manchester. They make participatory, playful work that uses language in its widest sense, including metaphor and everyday visual language, as a lens to explore class, gender and society. Aesthetically they are influenced by their working-class background, utilising everyday items as materials in order to unpick preconceived notions and distinctions between high and low art, cultural value and societal status. They use humour as a site of resistance from which structural inequalities can be made visible. They have been artist-in-residence on the Limehurst estate in Oldham since 2016, they have also completed residencies for Kahoon Projects and the Nasty Women International Art Prize and have exhibited work at galleries across the UK.

Episode 1: Framework for Resilience - Ecological Empathy

Re:Formed is a new commission by queer, disabled artists Tammy Reynolds and Natalia Bedkowska and queer audio describer, Dot Alma for FACT Together. Their work looks at accessibility not just as a basic right, but as a radical creative practice. Re:Formed exists on the FACT website as an accessible online photography gallery and series of conversations between the artists, made into a podcast. The work explores how access can be produced within the same space, and with the same intent, of the artwork to which it refers. Working together as queer practitioners, the trio forms a relationship of exchange, reclaiming the gaze so often used against them - through a process of mutual trust, and collective learning.

Re:Formed

Celebrate International Dawn Chorus Day with us! Acclaimed ecological field recordist and musician Geoff Sample joins with Daniel Thorne, saxophonist, composer and founder of the Immix Ensemble, to create a sonic reimagining of the dawn chorus. Using musical instruments, Thorne will respond to Sample's recordings of different landscapes and the birds that inhabit them - from woodlands to wetlands, to parks and cities - echoing the call and response of the morning symphonies we hear every day. This project is part of The Living Planet, a free online programme that explores our relationship with the natural world. To find out more, visit fact.co.uk/thelivingplanet

Natural and Unnatural Landscapes

FACT and a-n present Precarity in the Arts. Listen to Julie Lomax, CEO of a-n The Artists Information Company, and Emily Speed, Artist and Chair of a-n Artists Council, in conversation with artists in Liverpool on the ongoing debate about precarious work in the field of contemporary art. FACT is a leading visual arts organisation, based in Liverpool, that makes internationally exceptional art, science and technology projects that radically explore society and its most pressing issues. a-n initiated the Paying Artists campaign and is the largest professional membership organisation for visual artists in the UK with over 24,000 members. This discussion was recorded live and took place at FACT on Tuesday 30 July 2019.

Precarity in the Arts

FACT is a leading visual arts organisation. Imagined and made in Liverpool, we make art, science and technology projects that radically explore society and its most pressing issues.

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FACT

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