Announcement | Experimental Writing Commissioned Artists

Following our multi-lingual Open Call process last October and November, performingborders and performance, possession + automation are proud to announce the recipients of the experimental writing commissions: Madalena Bettencourt & Lúcia Santos, an*dre neely and Moi Tran.

Over the next few months, we will be accompanying these artists’ processes, to publish the commissions in full in March 2024.

Read more about Madalena & Lúcia, an*dre, and Moi:

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Madalena Bettencourt, sound enthusiast and self-proclaimed sonoplástica, is fiercely looking to interpret the world through the exercise of listening. Beyond sculpture, she covers any discipline that allows her to treat Sound as an entity. Lúcia Santos, explores her fascination for the transient nature of objects, understanding how these relate to herself and how both integrate multimedia art, performance and life. Despite seemingly contrasting practices and approaches, their works complement and contradict each other harmoniously. With writing being the essential thread that ties their differences, it becomes the common ground where they meet and explore from in a new phase of collective work – opening themselves up to the unpredictability of a joint creative process.

an*dre neely (b’93, Lisbon) is an artist, dramaturg, and facilitator, working with performance, text, material and spatial practice, video and sound. They’re interested in technologies of labour, of affect, of collaboration, desire, control and urbanity, and in how these shape perceptions of space, time, bodies – and its relations; particularly when it comes to the blurring of the spheres of the private and the public, of the intimate, the erotic, the (para-)social, and the surveilled. Their research happens mostly in collaboration, and culminates in multidisciplinary, and often live, set-ups: durational performances, installations, transdisciplinary texts and readings, or online hybrid-form interventions. Their work has been published by Something Other, Montez Press, the Hebbel-am-Ufer Theater, the Live Art Development Agency, and read/performed at ArtsAdmin, Sound Art Radio, Buzzcut Festival, Teatro da Politécnica (PT), ArkDes (SE), Sophiensaele, Frankfurt LAB, and the Berlinische Gallery (DE). an* lives and works in Berlin and London.

Moi Tran works with research, theatre, text, sound, installation, video, and performance to examine theorisations on emotional intelligence, the politics of audition and encounters of witness in events of fugitive performativity. Her interests in communication theory and analogue encoding/decoding have produced experiments for imagining alternative narratives in repositories of information. She works with sound makers, dancers, actors, community-performers to reimagine conventional performance making. Tran has presented and performed her work nationally and internationally,‘Well Settled’ (LUX U.K & OutPost VN); ‘SLEEP’(Live Art Development Agency/Royal Court /Pushkin House); ‘Civic Sound Archive’ Solo show PEER (UK); ‘Reshaping the collectible’ Tate Modern (UK); Sign Chorus (Da Nang, Vietnam); ‘Sonic Signalling in Reverse’ (Gothenburg Biennale)’; ‘The Bolero Effect’ (VCCA Vietnam); ‘The Circuit’ (Prague Quadrennial Festival); ‘I love a broad margin to my life’ Solo show (Yeo Workshop, Singapore); Shy God Chapter Mot (Chisenhale)‘Shy God – A Chorus’ (SPILL Festival UK); Landing 1.2.3 (Mark Rothko Centre Latvia)

performance, possession + automation (pp+a) is a collaborative research project led by Nicholas Ridout, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), Dhanveer Singh Brar, University of Leeds and Orlagh Woods (creative producer), in partnership with Fierce Festival (Birmingham) and Transform Festival (Leeds) and with the collaboration of performingborders (London). This is a three-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Thank you to Giulia Palladini and Lila Tiago for translation support during the Open Call.

Main image: Courtesy of Madalena Bettencourt & Lúcia Santos.

Slide show images: Lúcia Santos (courtesy of the artist), Madalena Bettencourt (courtesy of the artist), an*dre neely (courtesy of the artist), and Moi Tran (credit: Yiannis Katsaris).