All the Birds Sing Bass at Nottingham Contemporary is a convening exploring strategies of speech and spaces of listening.
Taking place over the week of 19-25 June, All the Birds Sing Bass features performance, conversation, music, workshop and screening with contributions by Annie Goh, David Blandy, Jake Mehew, Chooc Ly Tan, Vibeke Mascini & Ella Finer, Fleur Melbourn & Tirzah, Steven Feld, Ufuoma Essi, Noor Abed, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Jol Thoms, amongst others.
Curated by: Canan Batur, assisted by Philippa Douglas
Join artist David Blandy in World-Building x Tabletop: Gathering Storm to explore the impacts of colonial food production through his new collaborative world-building game, Gathering Storm.
Sun 25 Jun, 1pm–3pm Book Now
For the past few years, David has been experimenting with the form of group world-building; using voice, writing and drawing to imagine new worlds and societal systems collaboratively.
For this session we will explore collective world-building, using table top role-play techniques to think about how we can use these forms to expand ideas around society and history.
In Gathering Storm, the game guides the players through adding elements to a map, imagining a postcolonial sci-fi world and then creating a set of characters to inhabit this space, using a streamlined card-based system. Through a series of prompts, players come to terms with hidden histories and present injustices.
No previous experience of tabletop gaming is necessary to play. Gathering Storm is a participatory event which involves complex themes, narratives and storytelling
Gathering Storm was developed at Delfina Foundation's Politics of Food programme in association with Gaia Art Foundation in 2022.
All the Birds Sing Bass
Nottingham Contemporary
Mon 19 Jun – Sun 25 Jun
Nottingham Contemporary presents All the Birds Sing Bass, a convening exploring strategies of speech and spaces of listening.
Taking place over the week of 19-25 June, All the Birds Sing Bass features performance, conversation, music, workshops and screenings with contributions by Annie Goh, David Blandy, Jake Mehew, Chooc Ly Tan, Vibeke Mascini & Ella Finer, Fleur Melbourn & Tirzah, Steven Feld, Ufuoma Essi, Noor Abed, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Jol Thoms, amongst others.
How can we form alliances to create tools that strengthen our communication strategies and ability to listen? Can we create new maps of what we can and cannot hear to remember collective experiences, recognize non-human actions, and conspire new myths? How can we “bottom” the weight and the wobble introduced by sonic positions peripheral to the contested centre?
All the Birds Sing Bass centres dissenting views, sounds and voices, looking at the ripples that propose an alternative history writing and participation via practical solidarity. This series avails itself to resonances and dissonances that problematise preconceptions and totalising paradigms. It sings ‘base’, voicing the evident exclusions upon which postings of taxonomies and categorisations depend.
“Dissonance .... leads to discovery” writes William Carlos Williams. Devising languages through sonics, dissonance through movements and capturing what is felt, seen and heard, this series of events consider how narratives could be poetically and sonically claimed while creating echoes through the relationship of the body to other bodies, water and soil. It navigates through the architectures of land and reclaims the role sonics can play in disrupting dominant knowledges, histories and power.