We were having one of our usual phone calls. Talking about life, dealing with the distance the pandemic had enforced upon us. Then there was a suicide that hit your family. Grief overwhelmed us both. I could not reach you. I wanted to cross the border from the UK to the EU, but death is not essential travel. I wanted to smuggle my body across the border. I was not allowed. Instead, I was forced to use my words. To write and read as you moved away into the silence of your family home. This is a call to you, wherever you are, that you are not alone in your grief right now.

"Lamentation No.1: A Smuggler's Guide to Loss" are the recorded fragments from the diary I keep, starting on the days of a phone call with a friend and the suicide of his father. From this point on I meditated on what it meant to think about to address those who can no longer respond. Whilst wondering how to carry the weight of loss for another, smuggling words in our bodies, and what it means to become smugglers of the bond, opening our homes to objects and bodies to grieve for those that are no longer here. In these times of distance words and objects are our greatest travellers. 

Joshua Leon is an artist, writer and Ph.D. candidate at the Royal College of Art in London researching lament and Jewishness. He works from peripheral positions, moving and thinking through personal and private gestures to access a combination of subjectivity, heritage and a re-staging of voices by blending writing, poetic performance, objects and exhibition making. Within this Leon investigates the conditions that produce precarity and its performativity. Leon’s work is constantly collecting and reordering itself to produce an inventory of life treating conditions and sites as fluid and continuous by unfolding mechanisms for producing meaning.

Joshua Leon "Lamentation No.1: A Smuggler's Guide to Loss"

A science-fantasy novel set in Manchester, UK in 2080, Orion J. Facey’s "The Virosexuals" portraits a subculture that shares a desire to escape the broad algorithmization of our lives, bodies, and minds. Experimenting with virosexuality—the sexual attraction to transmitting and receiving STI’s—, the group around the main character Amygdala negotiates their bodies and desires while being faced with a virus sweeping the scene and the dangers and vulnerabilities of going off-grid.
 
Edited by Taylor Le Melle for their collaboratively run independent publisher PSS [with Daniella Valz Gen, Ima-Abasi Okon and Rehana Zaman], an excerpt of the book is here translated into a screenplay, accompanying its release. The characters meet during a watershed, cathartic moment of the novel. Voiced by PSS along with artists Jesse Darling, G, Christopher Kirubi, Natasha Lall, and the author Orion J. Facey. Soundtrack by KINDNESS.
 
The following is an excerpt from a conversation commissioned and published by Banner Repeater between Taylor Le Melle (T) and Orion J. Facey (O):
 
T: One of the minor characters, Stylbe, is, as I understand it, two people with one soul. They is also queer. The way you wrote this character, and constructed the queer social scene that they is a part of, was grammatically so nimble and delicate in terms of use of pronouns, noun-verb agreement, plural, singular. What was your strategy for that? What did you pull from? Were there any examples that you followed or did you have to make a lot of decisions on your own about how you would essentially morph English to fit their worlds?
 
O: Whilst I was writing the book, some of the other characters in the novel went through various edits, including changes to the pronouns that they use. Whilst I was changing the pronouns of characters one by one, it would often create these cases where there was grammatical non-agreement with genders (She picked up her cup and then he drank from it). A similar thing would happen when I changed the agent of an action from a group to an individual. I found these syntactic glitches interesting and wondered if they could be exploited to represent a queer identity that fluctuated on a quantum scale, and I decided that Stylbe (who already existed in the novel by this point) would be a good characters to use for this experiment.
 
 
PSS is a publisher of printed material.
 
Orion J. Facey is a writer of science-fantasy and a textile artist.
 
Taylor Le Melle writes, organises and produces objects.
 
Banner Repeater is an Artist-led contemporary art space: a reading room, and experimental project space, founded by Ami Clarke in 2010.
 
Special thanks to Ami Clarke at Banner Repeater.

Taylor Le Melle "Orion J. Facey’s The Virosexuals"

"It’s 10pm. Do You know where your children are?" narrates the struggles of teenagers dealing with their queerness within varying family dynamics and socio-political realities. The intertwined stories of the two protagonists touch upon memories, expectations and values shared between parents and their offspring with a diasporic background, unveiling the confluence of primary feelings of love, hate, desire and regret. Nicholas Grafia and Mikołaj Sobczak combine these anachronistic, personal fragments with other texts such as news items, statistics and research outcomes relating to BIPoC and LGBTQI+ individuals. The artists not only seek to negotiate individual positions in relation to religion, Slavic and Philippine folk traditions, scientific data and lived experiences, but also make the complexity of intergenerational, reciprocal understanding palpable.

The podcast "It’s 10pm. Do You know where your children are?" is a reworked version of an earlier staged performance. Since 2014 Nicholas Grafia and Mikołaj Sobczak often collaborate for performances and video installations, with which they reveal stories of marginalized people, and challenge notions of heteronormativity, patriarchism and eurocentrism. Their collaborative works have among others been shown and/or performed at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (PL); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (DE); Shedhalle, Zürich (CH); Dortmunder Kunstverein (DE). 

Nicholas Grafia (born in 1990, Philippines) holds a MFA from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (DE). He has previously studied at the Kunstakademie Münster (DE) and the School of Arts and Cultures in Newcastle (UK) as well as British, American and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Münster (DE). 

Mikołaj Sobczak (born in 1989, Poland) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Warsaw (PL) in the Studio of Spatial Activities, followed by a scholarship at Universität der Künste Berlin (DE), and studied at the Kunstakademie Münster (DE). From September 2021, he will start a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (NL). 

Postproduction: Nagel Eins Studio Berlin

Nicholas Grafia and Mikołaj Sobczak "It’s 10PM. Do You know where your children are?"

"The Podcast City" follows a script which could also be a template for one of Phung-Tien Phan’s films, in which the artist explores contemporary lifestyles, the performativity of daily life and our different roles between labor and leisure time. As her own roles move fluidly between author of the script, artist, and actor, her practice is situated in a close network of relationships and the social and material conditions of her own creative labor, while addressing questions of creativity, social privileges, and neoliberal logics of consumption and self-marketing.

Voices: Maximilian Schmötzer, Simon Mielke, Phung-Tien Phan

Postproduction: Nadel Eins Studio Berlin

Phung-Tien Phan (*1983, GER) lives and works in Essen. Her works have been presented, amongst others, at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (2020); at Galerie Drei, Cologne (2019); Campoli Presti, London (2019); Stadtgalerie, Bern (2019); Glasgow Project Room, Glasgow (2018); 8. Salon, Hamburg (2018); Shanaynay , Paris (2017); Belle Air, Essen (2017); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2016); or Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2015).

Phung-Tien Phan "The Podcast City"

Root Canal "I'll Never be a Star I've Always Been the Moon"

Pogo Bar Podcasts are a series of long poems, sound scapes, essays, speculative interviews, and potential histories, commissioned by KW Institute for Contemporary Art. For the time being, the collective space of the physical Pogo bar is moved to the digital realm, with two new podcasts to be released on a monthly basis. The podcast series is curated by Kathrin Bentele and Léon Kruijswijk, Assistant Curators at KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

Joshua Leon "Lamentation No.1: A Smuggler's Guide to Loss"

KW Pogo Bar Podcasts

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