A fantastical Journey to the Antipathies: Poetry, alchemy, and the Octopus

This performance/talk consisted of a summary of practice research in progress, relating to a long poem called The Voyage of the Stateless, itself a volume within a larger project called The Diver's Manual. I discussed the historical underpinning to my fantastical voyage replete with characters from art history; anchoring it to a very specific voyage taken by dissident artists and intellectuals fleeing Marseille from Nazi occupied france in 1941. I discussed the influence of Ernst Bloch's utopian philosophy (in his multi-volume The Principle of Hope); and the relevance of the Paper Nautilus Octopus and the work of female scientist Jeanne Villepreux-Power. I then performed an excerpt from the poem's opening accompanied by my own video backdrop.