Lucian Moriyama, Anastasia Hadjipapa-McCammon and Francesca Hawker:
Collective-in-residency
Off the Grid
Periode: 22.01—18.05.2025
Lucian Moriyama, Anastasia Hadjipapa-McCammon and Francesca Hawker (Off the Grid) is a collective using a variety of ultra-mundane mediums, which they introduce as Coffee Machines which sound a lot like rain, music and radio piracy, as well as detective-like performances. During the residency they will appropriate the codes and objects of the office, the kitchen, the bar, developing an installation and lounge-cabaret performance to be premiered in spring 2025.
Lucian Moriyama, Anastasia Hadjipapa-McCammon and Francesca Hawker:
Collective-in-residency
“The phrase ‘bureaucratic nightmare’ brings together, without any apparent contradiction, the fluorescent, illuminated world of papers and weights and the unreal, formless world of dreams.
This slippery place between the mundane and the macabre, between real monotony and imaginary fears, has been called Kafkaesque, surreal, or Lynchian. Trapped within systems of increasing complexity with diminishing returns, there is a common tension and anguish: things don’t make sense.
Our project aims to explore this contradictory space of the ultra-mundane. Working throughout the building of the artist’s residency CAS-CO, we will appropriate the codes and objects of the office, the kitchen, the bar, developing an installation and lounge-cabaret performance to be premiered in spring 2025.
The incident(al)
The composer Robert Ashley, explaining the role of singers in his operas, stated: ‘I don’t think there is any heroism anymore.’ Instead, his works often focused on incidental speech, nervous tics, stutters, and mumblings.
Drawing from performance techniques developed by Robert Ashley, Laurie Anderson, Gary Farrelly, and Sue Tompkins, our working methodology will explore incidental strategies. By listening to the ultra-mundane, we want to explore how the difficulties of language, bureaucracy, embarrassment, and failure can be integrated into our collective artistic practice.
These strategies are already present in our work. Francesca Hawker’s installation Coffee Machine which sounds a lot like rain (2022), for example, presents a series of coffee mugs containing a printed e‑mail exchange concerning a performance which was cancelled due to rain. It is a conceptual resumé of a performance that could have been. The installation includes a drip-filter coffee machine, the incidental sounds of which are amplified, evoking an oncoming storm.
Similarly, Lucian Moriyama’s sculpture Lighthouse transforms navigating bureaucracy and failure into an artistic gesture of hope and liberation. In the spirit of pirate radio, he circumvents regulations on radio waves and invents protocols to transmit his songs over visible light. By sending sound through light, shadows become silence, and lenses become amplifiers.
Anastasia Hadjipapa-McCammon’s performances revolve around the figure of the detective, transforming everyday objects into clues. The detective offers a mask or disguise through which to encounter the world; Her performance Holes of Deep Importance, used a radio show narrative to delve into themes of paranoia, bureaucracy, and the mundane by connecting objects with a detective’s red thread.
When taken together, these gestures demonstrate a shared resolve to transubstantiate failure into fantasy, the overlooked into the fundamental.”