Artist in residence at the Centre for Creative Explorations 2024
ALT CLUB/CLUB ALT
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Club Alt Closing Event 17th September 2024 4-6 pm
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Welcome to the closing event of a year-long residency hosted by Centre for Creative explorations (CCE) which brings together, students, artists, academics and the community. Artist Nazneen Ayyub-Wood has collaborated with the students at Harris Girls’ Academy in East Dulwich to produce a series of alternate realities reimagining new ways to co-exist with plant and animal species.
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At the South London Gallery we will show work developed after school (Club Alt) this year by students from Years 9 -11.
We will be presenting three immersive encounters produced as part of the residency, previously premiered in Peckham Festival 2024. As well as a large-scale visual reimagining conceived for this event.
Using the premise of the Umwelt – the German word for ‘environment’ – defined by Baltic-German Zoologist Jakob von Uexhill. Alt Club members have explored the perceptual world of animals by initially processing and exploring within their own Umwelt...
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Alt Club will engage with members of the public under the guise of an acquaintance to invite them into the immersive encounter. Once settled the participants will engage in an Alt Club brainstorming session – giving them an insight to how the following works: Roosting (2024) and Animal Farm 2 (2024), were manifested. Alt Club invites participants to play a giant version of the childhood game ‘Fortune Teller’ to reimagine our world with plants and animals. Originally, a form of
Japanese origami, fortune tellers – as the name suggests – can tell someone’s future based on their combination of choices.
Roosting (2024) invites the participant to experience a group resting practice inspired by the break in migration of the Monarch butterflies who travel 3000 miles from their breeding grounds to New Mexico to rest during winter. This is where they hang motionless, semi-dormant, in their masses. The sound piece is composed by Maxima, it touches on how we are
confined to our own perceptual Umwelts, which at times seem all encompassing.
With reference to The Carnival of Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns, the piano voice expresses a range of emotions experienced when our sleep is interrupted by anxiety and panic produced from the difficulties within friendship or other social groups. This encounter is completed by a feedback form. This acts as the ultimate experience, not only are participants greeted by guides posing as an acquaintance. The form is a way of checking in with them – as they have encountered an alternate world, something out of the ordinary, it gives a space for a different kind of conversation - acting as an icebreaker to engage on deeper level.
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In Animal Farm 2 (2024) Maud has speculated the future of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Animal Farm is a fable about a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer to create a society where they all could be equal.
In this tabletop encounter, they are exploring negative human character traits that influence the pig agriculturalists referencing furthermore to the self-isolating human Umwelt. They have encapsulated this in a showdown between a human farmer who reaches out to his ex-animals for basic resources.
This one-to-one encounter invites the participant to crawl under a dark cover sheet and kneel on a cushion. Under the cover they will encounter a barnyard diorama whilst facing a veiled presence. The cardboard diorama visualises the ‘showdown’ scenario: the pig agriculturists seated around a long table staring at the human farmer who is standing alone.
Maud has skilfully vocalised a snort sounding morse code in the audio. Words such as ‘Hi!’, ‘What?’ & ‘Go!’ are escalated creating a sense of despair and chaos.
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Both ‘Roosting’ and ‘Animal Farm 2’ were informed by animal Umwelten, however the current encounters have served as a mirror to our own Umwelten. Perhaps this is the first step on our journey to reimagine our world with other species...
Alongside the immersive encounters a new work has developed and conceived specifically for this event reimagining the natural environment.
In preparation of the residency, the artist started to arrange visual reimagining’s from images of
fragments of plant species from her last trip to Panama - illustrating the ‘alternate theme’ of the residency and her research.
Inspired by this new work – Ava had travelled to Trinidad and Tobago in the summer and had taken images of tropical and leafy hillsides. Her images of details and fragments depict calmness and the expansive terrain. This large-scale
arrangement presents an alternate reimagining of her journey. The images of the landscape are organised ‘flipped versus unflipped’ to describe an alternate world.