Air Divinations: Collective Enquiry

The final of four “divinations” created to inform the creation of the Brent Biennial 2025. A one-day programme structured around air, featuring workshops and collective imagining.

Why Air?

A catalytic substance of ignition; breath symbolises life. Air/breath also represents the power of utterance; declaration, song, whistles, chants, spells, of mobilising ideas and knowledge, people and animals. An intangible, invisible force that creates frameworks such as culture, education, legal systems, religion and ideologies.

The four elements: the foundations of our collective enquiry

(Re)building requires the four elements. Earth, water, fire and air form the basis of many ancient philosophical systems; they are the essential ingredients in the alchemical processes of creation and transformation. Each element symbolises and energises a deeper understanding of different facets of existence. When combined, these essential elements have the potential to reconfigure our understanding of structures and knowledge, and help us to remake our world.

The Venue

University of Westminster

University of Westminster is one of the top 20 universities in the UK, and top 30 for international students globally, with 48% of its students being classified as international students (2023). Its Center of Research and Education in Art and Media is renowned for its staff and alumni, many of whom are established researchers, artists and curators.

Northwick Park Hospital

The Northwick Park underground station and Northwick Park Hospital are situated next to the University of Westminster. Northwick Park Hospital is a major National Health Service hospital, managed by the London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust, and its constituents of staff and clients draw from migrant communities (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic), that form sixty-four per cent of Brent’s population, with representation from more than 200 countries.

The Programme

9.45am Meet in front of the main building of University of Westminster Harrow Campus.

Address: Watford Road, Northwick Park, Middlesex, HA1 3TP.
The room we will be using is J1.03.
The nearest tube is Northwick Park or Kenton.

10.00am Stakes Placed in the Wake of Communal Movement – Nick Murray (90 mins)

This is a workshop in two sections. In the first part, Nick will introduce some texts about air, how we consider and conceive of it. Together the group will talk about community-forming, how this resonates with them and how they would go about creating a space for community. These ideas will be written down on a series of manifesto cards that each participant will take with them into the next section.

The second part will take place as a walk from the walls of the University of Westminster into the uncontained outside. This will be a gentle and drifting walk with moments for rest along the way. During the walk we will hear some performative texts, swap manifesto cards, and play some quick group games, responding to the nature of communal walking, airy and immaterial body forms, and community action. Finally, we will close the loop and come back to the event space to reflect on what is important for community forming. We will bring together our writings from the workshop into a personal guide, mini-zine and manifesto for socially-led creative action.

11.30am Morning Tea/Coffee

11.45am World Engine – David Blandy (2 hours)

Together, the group will undertake an exercise in worlding, imagining a future world for exploration and play through the use of Blandy’s World Engine document. The group will be guided through a process of ideation, discussing possible futures, culminating in a new document that will serve as both a portrait of this new space, and a self-contained tabletop game. 

1.30pm Lunch

2.30pm The oysters and the witch – Jesse Jones (2 hours)

In this workshop Jesse Jones with call in the element of air through a spell casting with Oyster shells gathered from the Atlantic coast island of Sherkin island, West Cork. In this moment of profound transformation that leading to a sense of instability and uncertainty. In this moment of instability air is a powerful material to conjure the ritual of melting all that is solid to air through ritual and divination. 

The workshops will draw on Jesse’s recent research into the Oyster and in particular the Oyster as weapon in the public execution of Hypathia in 415 AD, whose body was torn to pieces using oyster shells and scattered through the streets of Alexandria. This act marks one of the most famed public execution of a woman for “witchcraft” and is the origin of the phrase to “Ostracise”.

This workshop will be a material shell-spell casting using Oyster shells from Sherkin island where Jesse Jones works as a lecturer on the BA Visual arts program which has been based in the context of an island community for 25 years. 

This workshop aims to explore the role of the Oyster from histories of extraction to its aphrodisiac and divination qualities in order to create a shared shell spell casting that may hex Patriarchal control of human and non-human bodies. Participants will instead aim to open up a channel of enchantment of the body/bodies transformation, resistance and pleasure.  

4.00pm Afternoon Tea & Coffee

4.30pm One Half Step – Forms of Circulation (2 hours)

Forms of Circulation (Sarah Perks and Paul Stewart) invite you to create a new work together. The workshop begins through a series of guided methods to express knowledge by making scores, sounds, and gestures to create a polyvocal gathering.

Through a collectively selected 5-track karaoke playlist we will write, develop, and plan a script/ treatment for a new 15 second, looped karaoke video to accompany the track, filmed on location. One Half Step comes from the time taken between inspiration and expiration of a breath. The sharp intake is both the half step of depression and expression, and the pitch change it harbours. Like a sharp symbol (♯) in music it’s a move in semitone, a recalibration or expression higher than where the breath started.

About the Artists

David Blandy

David Blandy (he/him) is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas as diverse as ecology, history, science and arenas of play. He makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again.

David searches for meaning in cultural life, through an expanded form of auto-anthropology, sifting through multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives, weaving poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. Perhaps it’s hubris, but he wants to build complex stories that sketch out a future of interdependence, through visual poetry and immersive play.

Forms of Circulation

Forms of Circulation is a collaboration between Sarah Perks and Paul Stewart. FoC’s practice, often workshop and film-based, brings together considerations into engagement, power, and knowledge. Participatory projects have explored nature recovery through meditation and spatial practice through to using generative AI to question how collections can dream. There work and films have been selected at multiple international festivals. Projects are currently taking place from London to Tokyo, from IMT gallery series, ‘Salty Measures’ to ‘partially incorrect answers’ on residency at 0-ea, Yokosuka, alongside the practicing duets series with Sophia Yadong Hao and Edgar Schmitz (The Ignorant art schools collective). https://formsofcirculation.com/

Nick Murray

Nick Murray is a game-maker, composer and artist making interactive sonic and narrative work focusing on loss and digital cultures. This often takes the form of games, interactive poetry and performance. Nick is Lead producer for Now Play This at Somerset House, Director of Playing Poetry and associate producer with Penned in the Margins. In 2023 Nick was selected as part of Film London’s Lodestars cohort, celebrating innovative film and game-makers across the capital. From September 2024 Nick is the ACAVA Artist in Residence at Barham Park.

Jesse Jones

Jesse Jones is an artist based in Ireland. Her practice is multi-platform, working in film installation, performance and sculpture.  Using a form of expanded cinema in the form of film, sculpture and performance, she explores magical counter-narratives and alternative histories drawn from suppressed archetypes myth and modes of speculative Feminism.

Jesse represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2017 with the work Tremble Tremble. Her recent project entitled Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon was commissioned by the National Gallery London and Ikon gallery for solo presentation in 2024 along with Gentileschi’s; “Self portrait as St Katherine the Martyr”,1616.

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