11 Collaborations #5

Book your place for the opening event here
Friday 5 November 2021, 6-8pm (GMT) at 6 Dorset Place, BN2 1ST

Open Tuesday to Saturday, 12 – 5pm
Thursday, 12 – 7pm
Admission free, all welcome

For their inaugural exhibition, LIMB collective explores [hydro]ecology as speculative writing. Thinking through wet ecologies as sensitive surfaces, inscribing agencies, and archives, LIMB’s members look towards nonhuman expansions of ‘inscription’ itself.

The exhibition attempts to appropriate the cartographic and economic practice of hydrography into hydrographism. While the former describes the physical features of water primarily for navigation safety and economic development, hydrographism imagines ways of sensing, narrating, and understanding aquatic environments. The exhibition facilitates LIMB’s collective critique around aquatic taxonomy while displaying experiments with more-than-human forms of writing and thinking through water.

In Gerridae Juliette Pénélope Pépin re-interprets the taxonomy of pond skaters by tracing their movement patterns and their power to almost levitating above water. Leaving bodies of water to their own rhythm of thriving and evolving, Sam Kaufman’s multimedia installation metabolism 3 (ghosts) extends the gallery space as a place for digital and living algae to metabolize indifferent to a human audience. From ponds to the coastline towards wetlands: How to embody their choreographies of temporality? For Marguerite Minnot-Thomas, rituals are inscriptions of the long sense of temporality. In her image series Wayfinding, she retraces and reinscribes together with her family wetlands’ features. As such, wetlands ultimately become part of intergenerational narratives.

Accompanying the exhibition is a vitrine which functions as a living archive. Visitors are invited to leave, bring and take objects that respond to the exhibition’s themes and public programme. In this way, anyone can contribute to an open archive feeding into new eco-poetic methods of more-than-human kinship.

Hydrographism is supported by a versatile public program; hands-on workshops, reading sessions, and ‘wet walks’ to local dew ponds and freshwater sites are accessible to anyone willing to poetically explore techniques of seeing and sensing (with) water bodies. Finally, thanks to an online toolkit, the public is invited to explore local wet-ecologies on their own and place the visual, acoustic, or filmed traces of their journey into the exhibited vitrine.

Curated by Beatrice Zaidenberg

Events programme

Visual dialogue
Marguerite Minnot-Thomas and Elin Sundström
Sunday 14 November, 7pm- 8pm (GMT), Online
Book here

Reading Mieke Zwamborn’s Seaweed Collector’s Guide
Wednesday 17 November 2021, 7pm – 8pm (GMT), Online
Book here

How to walk on water: Sewing pond skater suits
Together with Juliette Pénélope Pépin
Saturday 20 November 2021, 1:30 pm – 3:30 pm (GMT), In-person
6 Dorset Place, Brighton BN2 1ST
Book here

Sensing water bodies: Dancing the Gerridae at Brighton’s ponds
Together with Juliette Pénélope Pépin
Sunday 21 November 2021, 3 pm – 5 pm (GMT), In-person
Meeting point: Gallery space, 6 Dorset Place, Brighton BN2 1ST
* Bring along your “pond skater suits” if participated in the previous workshop
Book here

LIMB is a collective of artists, writers, researchers and curators based between the UK, France, and Germany. Through collaborative projects and individual practices, they share a pluridisciplinary approach and think through entangled issues surrounding ecologies, interspecies communication, nonhuman life-worlds, aesthetics and language. Research-as-practice and practice-as-research lie at the heart of their work, and they continually engage in direct and indirect co-creations with webs of nonhuman interdependence.

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This is project #5 of Dorset Place x 11 collaborations – a new series of projects and work responding to the university as a site for experimentation and learning. Admission is free and open to all.

Dorset Place is Brighton CCA’s project space and hosts a series of short projects and exhibitions by emerging artists, organisations, curators and students. With a fast changing programme, the space is an exciting platform for experimentation, collaboration and engagement with new ideas and voices. Dorset Place allows us to be responsive, initiating and supporting projects which stand alone or connect to our wider programme. The space is offered free of charge with curatorial, marketing and limited technical support.

6 Dorset Place
Brighton BN2 1ST