It’s not a straight path,
tarmacked and hot under sun,
it’s a dirt path,
meandering
under the oaks.
The path is
freckled with shadows,
as I am freckled.
It’s a redhead’s path,
one for
forest beings,
those who
value
concealment.
It’s a path for
being quiet on.
For walking,
softly,
with silent
footsteps.
Neatly,
along the brown, bare earth.
It’s strange to be a visitor in a city you used to call home.
There are places; shops, cafes, buildings, whole streets that I once felt affection for, my university, my favourite cafe, the library and bookshop where I worked, all places that made this city feel like home for a while.
Walking through here today has been very odd. It’s not home any more and the old affections seem to have morphed into something closer to… curiosity? It’s hard to identify the emotion, but I feel an unexpected emotional distance from places that once evoked strong feelings.
The paths however are a different story. This city is a very busy tourist destination, and as a local I walked through it on the hunt, seeking out the quietest streets, dodging through the crowds, avoiding the tourist traps.
I, a being who is almost pathological in my desire to avoid humans, mentally mapped a whole network of quiet paths, roads, streets, snickleways and alleys to get myself through the city by the least busy, least crowded routes. I rarely took the shortest way to my destination, if a longer route was human free, or relatively so.
I can’t recall those routes just by thinking of them, I have a terrible mental memory, but coming here and re-walking them, some 13 years later, I discover that my body memory is superb. My body knows where to go, which turn to take. Even as my mind struggles to recall what is down that alley, around that corner. My body knows.
Weirdly, I feel as if the paths know me too. Buildings, attractions, shops, those things are mere curiosities now, and they care nothing for me, but the routes, the paths I walk again here, they feel welcoming, embracing.
‘Walk there, cross this road here, come down this alley, yes take that corner,’ I feel welcomed back to the old paths, welcomed into this place, this landscape…
Find outmore about …kruse’s work by clicking here to visit their studio.
For the fifth Vital Capacities‘ residency, we partner with Institute for Creative Arts (Cape Town) and Wysing Art Centre (Cambridge) to work with artists from both South Africa and the UK. From 2 August, artists Siphenati Mayekiso, Nadine Mckenzie, Rebekah Ubuntu and …kruse will join Vital Capacities, to undertake research and develop new work. Working with our partners, they will explore and exchange new ideas using their studio spaces, and create new commission works throughout the residency.
The artists for August 2021’s residency are:
Continue reading “UK & South African artists join Vital Capacities for August”
Vital Capacities resident artist, Seo Hye Lee, was interviewed by lutte collective as their featured artist for August. Lee talks about her work as a deaf artist working with sound, and her time during the residency on Vital Capacities.
Read the interview here: https://luttecollective.com/
[Sound of Subtitles] by Seo Hye Lee (2021), commissioned with University of Salford Art Collection as part of Seo Hye Lee’s residency, can now be seen in the exhibition by clicking here.
Hi there,
My name is Rebekah Ubuntu. I am a multidisciplinary artist, musician and university lecturer. My practice explores speculative fiction through a range of disciplines, particularly, sound art, performance, the moving image and mixed reality.
PROJECTS YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN
My work ‘Despair Hope and Healing: Three Movements for Climate Justice’ is available to experience in augmented reality app Unfolding Shrines which you can find here.
My audio art project ‘Autism and the City: a Sonic Diary’ is due to launch on the BBC next month so I’ll post that here once it’s ready.
You are warmly welcomed to my studio.
HOW I HOPE TO USE MY RESIDENCY
I’m hoping to use my residency to REFLECT.
I’ll be reflecting on my:
WHY REFLECTION?
My life and creative practice have undergone some major pivots since 2020. My last in-person commission before the pandemic was at Tate Modern in December 2019. I performed my work ‘Despair, Hope and Healing: Three Movements for Climate Justice’ and gave a talk about this work, which featured an excerpt from an interview in the 90s with Black science fiction writer Octavia Butler discussing the speculative impacts of climate change in the 2020s. Now nearly two years into this decade, I am feeling a need to process.
Looking back, I can see that 2020 and the years preceding didn’t leave much room for respite. This residency provides an opportunity for me to reorient my time and energy towards self-reflection, self-nurturance and self-celebration.
I’ll be pausing to be with the themes in my work, particularly belonging, healing and queering as well as disability and climate justice. I’ll be sitting with the scores, texts, and projects that have been on my heart and giving them the time I’ve not had until now.
It feels good to be here, sharing space and reflecting for a month. Please feel welcome to look around my studio and get in touch using comments if you’d like.
Hope you enjoy your visit,
Rebekah
Seo Hye Lee, whose work is now exhibiting on Vital Capacities, was interviewed by textur mag about the development of her new work, [Sound of Subtitles]. Read the interview now on textur.
Intertwined, which features Seo Hye Lee’s work, as well as artists Laura Lulika and Linda Stupart, can be seen now by clicking here.
Intertwined is our new exhibition on Vital Capacities, presenting new works by resident artists – Seo Hye Lee, Laura Lulika and Linda Stupart. The works have been commissioned in collaboration with our partners: Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN), Phoenix and University of Salford Art Collection. Intertwined opens on 22 July. See the exhibition now by clicking here.
Thinking about the ways that we formed ideas about our bodies and who had influence, especially in relation to our identities, is always a headfuck. Doing this project has been a reminder of this so I wanted to try to include an action that felt more nourishing, gentle and caring than my other research.
I asked a new friend, Melissandre Varin, who I had met through an online performance workshop, if they would have a conversation with me about these body topics. I had attended Mel’s artist talk and I find the way that Mel speaks about bodies and their own personal experiences to be very candidly honest and at the same time generous and kind.
Our latest exhibition by May 21 resident artists, Vishal Kumaraswamy, Tzu-Huan Lin and Katarzyna Perlak. See the exhibition now by clicking here.
I have really enjoyed occupying this digital studio space and having a dedicated period of time working on a single project. The support from vital Capacities and Film London has been amazing and I am excited to develop all of my research and tests into something to present as part of the exhibition later this month.
I am battling my own internal ableist voices which are telling me that I could have done MORE, posted more, worked more.. I have been resisting the urge to be professionally hyperable.. (yuck). And in many ways I have failed because I am exhausted.
So now it’s breaktime! If anyone needs me I’ll be in a static caravan on the Yorkshire coast for the week and you can speak to my out-of-office autoresponse until then.
In this post, I’m going to explain why I am using visual of the ceramic throwing process and hands crafting. In the picture above, the definition of throwing is described as “A mass of clay soon becomes an object of beauty in the hands of a skilled craftsman”- this description resonates with my intention of turning the subtitle into something of beauty, and something that should always be included from an accessibility point of view. On a side note: the word “craftsman” should be changed to craftsperson or maker (unfortunately, some old film archives can reveal archaic gender stereotypes).
Craft videos are fascinating as they frequently show pairs of hands making objects from a shapeless form into something beautiful. For me, this formation presents a parallel between the idea of digitally shaping words into the language of subtitles, exploring its poetic nature. I’d like to thank Will McTaggart from North West Film Archive for the recommendation of the beautiful craft films by Sam Hanna—to view these, this website has a compilation of Hanna’s craft films- the link is here.
As we are reaching the end of June residency, I would like to focus on making a visual connection between videos of hands throwing, crafting, intertitles, and open captions using re-written subtitle language.
I’ve been working on a costume with fashion designer, Max Allen, who is a school friend that I’ve known for yonks (since we were teens). The idea was to create something that combined the joke shop fancy dress muscle suits with the saggy and misshapen elements that mascot costumes have, as well as playing with sports kits. (See Research space for inspo images).
Remember when the Google glass came out years ago and ended up being not so popular? At the time, I wasn’t aware that the product had been designed to include the function of Live Captioning; while researching this I found this video of the product being used in a quiet setting.
There are many great resources you can use to transcribe speech to text on apps/browsers online. These resources work by either turning on the live transcribing function or uploading prerecorded audio files – a few I have used in the past are Webcaptioner, Google Transcribe App, Descript. (Each mentioned names are all hyper-linked which will lead you to its own websites)
Continue reading “Future of Live Captioning”
A long-term enthusiasm of mine is mascot costumes. I have a collection of images on my laptop and phone of my favourites. I especially like Tweety for reasons I will explain in a later post.
This video (click above ^^) documents the first part of my walk down the River Cole, as well as a lot of anxieties present in the first lockdown in 2020 in the UK. I made the video for So Remember the Liquid Ground , an exhibition curated by Benjamin Darby, Yoojin Kang, Akis Kokkinos, Angelina Li, Lenette Lua and Louise Nason as part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2020, Royal College of Art in partnership with Gasworks.
Aubree Penny – a friend and also curator – commissioned me to perform Some Men Have Mistaken Me for Death in a sex workers graveyard in London, AND commissioned the film version of After the Ice, the Deluge for An Alarming Specificity at Haverford College in the USA. London
Aubree wrote an audio transcription of Watershed, which you can read here: https://vitalcapacities.com/3108/
And a visual description, which you can read here: https://vitalcapacities.com/3110/
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