MOVING WITH STONE - EXPERIMENTS IN RUIN
JAMES ROGERS
working from a cliff edge near rossbeigh, co. kerry, my practice seeks to communicate with & through the elements. moving between sculpture, text & ritual, my process is guided by the ambient interactions of weather (external/internal), dreams, tongues & lithic imaginaries. i came into my arts practice through the study of languages, literatures & visual cultures - alongside periods of grief & illness. i currently co-run a series of creative workshops around feminist theories, practices & pedagogies, iterations of which have considered ‘weaving’, ‘breathing’ & ‘cultivating’ as verbal axes into playful collective inquiry. in 2019 i was an associate with the institute of things to come in turin & in 2017 i undertook a residency in upstate new york in collaboration with architect james rogers which set the collaborative *ambulithics* project in motion. in recent years, i have taught through the modern languages department at the university of cambridge & as part of the ensemble of the new school of the anthropocene, an alternative educational space in which art making becomes a means of thinking through climate breakdown. the way my work takes shape now might be described as a dance with experiences of im-mobility, chronic states & deinstitutional stirrings. through creative communities kerry, i am currently working on a participatory arts project around the ecologies & mythologies of rossbeigh, titled *the mantle*.
through its neologistic title, *ambulithics* draws stone into contact with the body through (un)certain forms of ritualised movement — temporal & corporeal. where ambulation speaks to transitional scales of perception through the shape of a *pace*, the lithic responds by asking — what do we desire or seek to reconcile through interactions between rock & flesh?
since its first iteration in upstate new york, *ambulithics* has travelled slowly, reemerging in new / old contexts around the world. each time, it demarcates & activates a community space for conversation & experimentation around mythological, ecological & sociopolitical forms of movement.
as an act of salvage & de/construction, *ambulithics* extends a provocation to the poetry & politics of ruin. is asks — how do we feel around various processes of ruin? what kinds of ruin have the capacity to conceal themselves (from some & not from others)? what have we ruined? what has been ruined for us? where can we hold our grief for the worlds set to ruin against our will, by militarist, imperialist & capitalist forces? experimenting with forms of contemporary ritual, what could we learn to bear witness to through different practices of ruining — how might we reencounter ourselves, together, within these circles of ruination?
thinking through the narratives of collapse & breakdown that characterise the climate emergency, *ambulithics* seeks to imagine [ruins] otherwise (thinking here through the terms of lola olufemi) — as collective portals into cycles of elemental relation from which we must continue to sustain ourselves. turning towards sophie strand’s comment that “old ideas still make good compost”, *ambulithics* invites participants to envisage alternate ways of thinking through ruin in the context of late capitalism & decolonisation — creating space, via site-specific prompts, rituals & performances, to attend to the fecundity & potentiality of deterioration through new / old modes of storytelling.