ADELAIDE DAMOAH

ARACHNE: REBIRTHING DISLOCATED CULTURES

 

Performed live on 27th April 2023 and filmed at Gagosian London on 24th April 2023.

In this video, artist Adelaide Damoah performs Arachne: Rebirthing Dislocated Cultures inside the Rites of Passage exhibition at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London. The audiovisual journey, which features an original sound piece by Damoah and composer Liz Gre, interrogates the history of colonialism with the intention of unlocking new modes of understanding.

Watch the film on the Gagosian Quarterly webiste here…

Quote from the forthcoming book by Stephen Baycroft:

Rites of Passage, Cultural and Naturalcultural Hybridity and Arachne: Rebirthing Dislocated Cultures

The naturalcultural hybrid [Arachne-Damoah] in Arachne Rebirthing Dislocated Cultures was capable of a ‘superhuman’ level of ‘alien’ performance; in which this hybrid used an ‘attention map’ of linguistic records from ‘past’ historical time-spaces, to ‘shamanically’ acquire the trans-binary thinking and oracular power needed to open toward ‘future’ historical time-spaces in ways that rewove the social structures of, – and thus broke the mind-forg’d manacles of colonialist, imperialist and racist binary thinking in, – the culture(s) in which the coloniser and colonised subjects participating in this performance lived in the Chthulucene(…)

Arachne-Damoah may be imagined not only to be the ‘monstrous’ and ‘emergent’ coevolutionary product of Damoah’s AI-augmented use of synthetic biotechnologies to overcome her arachnophobia, thereby trespassing across the boundaries between – and thus interweaving, – a ‘spider’ being with her own ‘human’ being; but also to exemplify what [Donna J. Haraway] Haraway called the artistic ‘fruit’ of ‘algorithmic code’ and ‘improvisational creativity’, that ‘lives enfolded in the materialities of global warming and toxic pollution’.