Somewhere between Memory and Memorial, Sandra Stanionyte.
Kunstraum, 2019. Photo by Jemima Yong.
F U T U R E R I T U A L
F U T U R E R I T U A L is a research and performance project considering the use, place and function of ritual in contemporary queer and performance cultures, and the relationship of these cultures and practices to ideas of expanded queer futurity.
F U TU R E R I T U A L has facilitated performance events throughout the UK. The next iteration will take the form of a season of performances, screenings, workshops and discussions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), the Live Art Development Agency and Chisenhale Dance Space in Autumn 2020.
F U T U R E R I T U A L positions ritual as a technology of speculative transformation, and queer ritual action is understood as a method for divination and augury - as a way of mapping, visioning, fabulating or otherwise embodying future potentialities. A future ritual might function by gesturing towards or manifesting or otherwise calling forth these alternate states, these other ways of being.
The project is a lab for performative research by Joseph Morgan Schofield and other invited artists. Through public performance events, F U T U R E R I T U A L aims to provide an active context for the presentation of performance art in the UK.
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a queer [future] ritual might be a ritual where rites and traditions are queered, or re-discovered, or enacted by queers for queers. it is likely engaged in the conscious rejection of heterosexual societal norms. they likely resist and critique the politics of assimilation and celebrate, instead, subversion, indecency, aberrance, and difference.
a queer [future] ritual might be a strategy for survival, for effecting social and political change, for taking on the world and for making it through the damn day.
a queer [future] ritual might involve dancing, sigil crafting, dragging up, singing, bleeding, mourning, celebrating, loving, shouting, or something else entirely.