'To Prepare our Lungs' Open Studio and Reading Group with Sophia Kosmaoglou

In this combined Open Studio and Reading Group facilitated by Sophia Kosmaoglou, participants will examine Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s text Expiration: The Last Breath to discuss the psycho-cultural perceptions of mortality under end-stage capitalism. Set within McCabe’s cyanotype-based practice – where scattering ashes, light exposure, and stitched time materialise as images – the session invites us to consider how the gesture of recording might itself become an act of chaosmosis, of signification, and of attunement to impermanence.

Readings will be shared via email with those who RSVP in advance of the event.

Open Questions:

• How does the tension between competition and empathy interact in the psychosphere to inform existential dread and notions of mortality today?
• How might the (physical and conscious) act of recording function as a mortality prime?
• How does experiencing shared meaning build a bridge over the abyss of entropy?
• Where does art build these bridges, these shared illusions; how do they look/sound/feel, where might they lead?

Programme

6:30-7:00pm Doors open and drinks

7:00-9:00pm Reading Group

9:00 Event ends

Biographies:

is an artist, educator and organiser working at the intersection of art, politics and pedagogy. Her interdisciplinary practice spans installation, moving image, performance, writing and critical research. She is the founder of ART&CRITIQUE, an alternative art education network committed to critical engagement with practice, theory and research, and co-founder of the Radical Pedagogy Research Group.Her work explores the politics of visibility, artistic autonomy, institutional critique and collective learning. She has a degree in sculpture and a practice-based PhD in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, where she taught studio practice and critical studies. She is a visiting tutor in critical studies and curating at Chelsea College of Arts UAL and an Artist Advisor at Artquest. Her current focus is on building a co-operative art school as a sustainable, self-organised alternative to mainstream art education.

Jane McCabe earned her BA in Studio Art and Architecture from Middlebury College 2015 before going into completing her MFA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths University (2023). McCabe currently lives and works in London, UK.

McCabe is a conceptual artist making photo objects, sculpture, and video projections, concerning the compulsion to record in relation to mortality. Her material investigations constitute abstracted indexes of experiential time. In her ongoing series, cyanotype photograms on silk of her father’s ashes are sensitised at night and printed in daylight. This active light-tracing demands a methodology which is both intuitive and practical. The act of scattering is one of collaboration of the hand wind and silk, where the climatic conditions determine both the formation of ash, and the deep blue time of the exposure. Across this series, repetition becomes habit becomes ritual.

Image courtesy of the artist.

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