forever in the loop of nonrepetitive return

Joshua Woolford (@jshwlfrd)

forever in the loop of nonrepetitive return, Collaboration w/ Vivienne Griffin

/ Always Coming Home, Matts Gallery 2024

/ Live performance & Installation

Borrowing the title from David’s Scotts Preface: Sylvia Wynter’s Agonistic Intimations (Small Axe vol. 20, no. 1, 2016) where Scott is referring to the continuous turning over of past experiences and arrival at new knowledges inherent in Caribbean (perhaps more broadly, diasporic) intellectual inheritances. The re-meeting and reclamation of the things ‘…we thought we knew but who can now belong to us in new and unexpected ways.’

Extending this idea to the looping, echoing and reverberating of sound where recognisable and repeated melodies make space and give way to improvisation. Call and response encourages an ever-evolving dialogue through electronic and acoustic instruments, movement of the body and vocals. forever in the loop of a nonrepetitive return is an experiment in tone, mood, form and collaborative work.

Born out of a desire to devise work that is emergent and liberated from a goal or completion, this work used the space as cite to fragment sound. Six speakers were dispersed throughout the space playing six separate channels, breaking away from the stereo output. The mix was made live and in this way was unique to each member of the audience depending on the position they had within the gallery - moving around the space exposed you to different versions of the same piece. Inherently site specific, no evolution of this piece will ever be the same as the last.

Other elements of the work which accompanied the electronic soundscape were a co-written text based on Griffin's PhD thesis, movement, live vocals, and a motorised self-playing harp processed through a modular synthesiser.

Photography by Chloe Page
Curator: A---Z (Anne Duffau)