INTO THE WYLD - Williamson Gallery and Museum Residency - Material Matters Collective 2023-2024
Into the Wyld is a festival of contemporary art and culture curated by Material Matters - Angelo Madonna, John Elcock, Patric Rogers, Silvia Battista - supported by the Wirral Borough of Culture and Liverpool Hope University. It explores the continuing legacy of the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and its unique connection to the Wirral. Across three exhibitions, the festival responds to key themes in the Gawain poem: nature, chivalry and spirituality and their relation to contemporary culture.
Into the Wyld is a festival of contemporary art and culture curated by Material Matters - Angelo Madonna, John Elcock, Patric Rogers, Silvia Battista - supported by the Wirral Borough of Culture and Liverpool Hope University. It explores the continuing legacy of the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and its unique connection to the Wirral. Across three exhibitions, the festival responds to key themes in the Gawain poem: nature, chivalry and spirituality and their relation to contemporary culture.
The Weavers Performance
Conceived by Silvia Battista
Devised and performed by Silvia Battista, Alice Colquhoun, Amodali
Costumes by Nick Ball
Projection - Moon Lullaby for Humans by Silvia Battista (conception and drawing) and Laura Spark (animation)
Produced by Liverpool Hope University, Material Matters, Williamson Gallery and Museum, Wirral Borough of Culture
Images by Benjamin Nuttall
The Weavers is an experimental theatre piece where voice, storytelling, rituals, costumes and space are devised to provide the audiences with an experience that is both absorbing and sensuous. Three allegorical characters conduct the narratives through a three-section structure involving masculine and feminine forces coming together into an alchemical celebration of life in its multiple forms. It is inspired by the role that Morgan le Fay plays in metaphorically weaving the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and her story as representative of a way of life in relation and conversation with non-human ecologies.
The Weavers is part of the performances and events’ programme curated by Silvia Battista for the project Into the Wyld conceived and created by Material Matters collective – Angelo Madonna, John Elcock, Patric Rogers, Silvia Battista; specifically for the third exhibition ‘Spirituality’ curated by Angelo Madonna.
Conceived by Silvia Battista
Devised and performed by Silvia Battista, Alice Colquhoun, Amodali
Costumes by Nick Ball
Projection - Moon Lullaby for Humans by Silvia Battista (conception and drawing) and Laura Spark (animation)
Produced by Liverpool Hope University, Material Matters, Williamson Gallery and Museum, Wirral Borough of Culture
Images by Benjamin Nuttall
The Weavers is an experimental theatre piece where voice, storytelling, rituals, costumes and space are devised to provide the audiences with an experience that is both absorbing and sensuous. Three allegorical characters conduct the narratives through a three-section structure involving masculine and feminine forces coming together into an alchemical celebration of life in its multiple forms. It is inspired by the role that Morgan le Fay plays in metaphorically weaving the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and her story as representative of a way of life in relation and conversation with non-human ecologies.
The Weavers is part of the performances and events’ programme curated by Silvia Battista for the project Into the Wyld conceived and created by Material Matters collective – Angelo Madonna, John Elcock, Patric Rogers, Silvia Battista; specifically for the third exhibition ‘Spirituality’ curated by Angelo Madonna.
ACT I: Moon's Lullaby for Humans
ACT II: The Knights of the 21st Century
ACT III: Interspecies - the Fairies
Directed - Silvia Battista
Drawing and voice - Silvia battista
Animation - Laura Spark
Sound and recording - Manoli Moriaty
Production - Material Matters, Wirral Borough of Culture, Liverpool Hope University, Williamson Gallery and Museum
Images - Benjamin Nuttall
ACT I: MOON'S LULLABY FOR HUMANS (2024) is the third phase of the Into the Wyld triad that moves the attention of the public toward the Moon, the Earth’s natural satellite, the celestial body orbiting around us all, the ultimate weaver. This Lullaby is meant to help humans to dream and connect to their cosmic ancestry, to the deep times of the chemical and elemental origins of life as we know it. It has been created specifically for the exhibition Chivalry of the Into the Wyld project curated by the Material Matters' collective at the Williamson Gallery and Museum, inspired by the medieval tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
ACT II: The Knights of the 21st Century
ACT III: Interspecies - the Fairies
Directed - Silvia Battista
Drawing and voice - Silvia battista
Animation - Laura Spark
Sound and recording - Manoli Moriaty
Production - Material Matters, Wirral Borough of Culture, Liverpool Hope University, Williamson Gallery and Museum
Images - Benjamin Nuttall
ACT I: MOON'S LULLABY FOR HUMANS (2024) is the third phase of the Into the Wyld triad that moves the attention of the public toward the Moon, the Earth’s natural satellite, the celestial body orbiting around us all, the ultimate weaver. This Lullaby is meant to help humans to dream and connect to their cosmic ancestry, to the deep times of the chemical and elemental origins of life as we know it. It has been created specifically for the exhibition Chivalry of the Into the Wyld project curated by the Material Matters' collective at the Williamson Gallery and Museum, inspired by the medieval tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
ACT II: THE KNIGHTS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (2024) is the second part of a three-animation tryptic created for the project Into The Wyld and specifically for the exhibition Chivalry at the Williamson Gallery and Museum, inspired by the medieval tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It plays with the possibility of utopic and affirmative horizons. It brings together spiritual traditions, folklore, humour and science fiction to tell of a knighthood learning to hold both masculine and feminine energies. Inspired by C.G. Jung's studies of alchemy and Ursula Le Guin's writing it is a storytelling about an affirmative knighthood struggling to achieve a new sense of ethical responsibility such a peace, non-violence and a fluid sense of identity.
Material Matters' artistic and curatorial practices which explore the inter-relationship between materials, aesthetics and performance can be explored here: www.materialmatters.org.uk | @materialmattersart
Material Matters' artistic and curatorial practices which explore the inter-relationship between materials, aesthetics and performance can be explored here: www.materialmatters.org.uk | @materialmattersart
ACT III - INTERSPECIES: THE FAIRIES (2024) is the first part of a three-animation tryptic created for the project Into The Wyld and specifically for the exhibition Nature at the Williamson Gallery and Museum inspired by the medieval tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It digitally embodies the character of Morgan Le Fay as a liminal figure: a human entity entangled with mycorrhizal fungi. The fairies, contrary to Victorian’s representations, are beings of the underworld, of soil and darkness. A voice over narrates the imaginary origins of the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, providing an elusive, but enchanting description.
Material Matters' artistic and curatorial practices which explore the inter-relationship between materials, aesthetics and performance can be explored here:: www.materialmatters.org.uk | @materialmattersart
Material Matters' artistic and curatorial practices which explore the inter-relationship between materials, aesthetics and performance can be explored here:: www.materialmatters.org.uk | @materialmattersart
Here to Become - Bridewell Gallery
Queering The Cross - 2023
Text, voice, music, drawings by Silvia Battista - Metal Cross by Ian Colligan
Here to Become / Material Matters - Bridewell Gallery / Liverpool Independent Biennial (2023)
Joint Liverpool Universities English Literature and Creative Writing Forum will take place at Hope University Creative (2023)
Research Seminar series at the University of Portsmouth (2024)
https://www.artinliverpool.com/events/independents-biennial-material-matters-here-to-become/
Queering the Cross is a speculative fabulation devised as an installation of drawings, objects, graphics, sound and storytelling exploring utopia narratives to engage the public with imaginative possibilities of emancipation in relation to social and environmental justice..
It was devised as part of the larger installation Here to Become devised with the Material Matters Collective.
Here To Become, stems from our shared connection to processes, questions, and uncertainty - rather than the didactic of end results of answers. We look at change as a condition of life, as an infinite process of becoming. Visitors were invited to embrace the alchemical qualities of the material and the symbolic weaved together into mythopoetics that are paradoxically both stable and mutable, human and more-than-human.
Tiresias and the chthonic Ones - 2022
Text, voice, music by Silvia Battista
Kazimir Garden In Liverpool
Text, voice, music by Silvia Battista
Kazimir Garden In Liverpool
Spirits Read Foucault 2015-2021
Written and performed by Silvia Battista. Filmed by Massimiliano Ferraina
RUINS festival (2021);
Hyderabad University, India (2016);
Rhodes University, South Africa (2016);
Greenwich University in London (2015);
Goldsmith University, London (2015);
www.ruins.media
Read more
Spirits Read Foucault consists in a performance-research-experiment that employs storytelling, guided visualization and mental imaginary. The aim is experiential and pedagogical wherein performance is used as a vehicle to guide audiences to reflect on death, on the meanings of our embodied lives, on the identity politics attached to our bodies and their appearances and what – if something – remains after the physical body is not longer here. My research’s intention is to encourage attention toward the intertwined body-mind liminal complex, as an order of materiality that actually crosses beyond its discrete boundaries to meet the spiritual. There, appearances seem to loose their grip on our perception and an opening for an intersubjective, energetic non-identity might perhaps emerge.
The Stories of the Firefly 2020
Conceived, written, devised and performed by Silvia Battista. Special guest Steve Boyland.
Angel Field Festival 2020, Liverpool, UK.
Presented in 2020, at the Angel Field Festival in Liverpool, with the special collaboration of vocalist Steve Boyland, 'The Stories of the Firefly' brings together visuals, experimental storytelling and sound. Written through the use of what Battista refers to as ritualistic writing, the resulting performance is a visceral, hypnotic, visionary journey. Inspired by the work of artists such as Laurie Anderson, Pauline Oliveros, Kimmo Pohjonen and Patti Smith it reflects on the poetics of active imagination, Buddhist philosophies and mythologies, and animistic ecologies.
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S.O.S.! Spirits of Sound 2019
'Sounds' Spirits' is an improvisatory piece between Silvia Battista and Annalaura Alifuoco presented at the event ALIEN SOUND, AMBIENT MUSIC AND THE LIMITS OF THE HUMAN
Liverpool Tate Gallery 2019
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/workshop/alien-sound
S.O.S.! Spirits of Sound 2019
'Sounds' Spirits' is an improvisatory piece between Silvia Battista and Annalaura Alifuoco presented at the event ALIEN SOUND, AMBIENT MUSIC AND THE LIMITS OF THE HUMAN
Liverpool Tate Gallery 2019
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/workshop/alien-sound
Persephone 2018
Devised by Silvia Battista in response to Angelo Madonna’s installation The Jugglers
Independent Liverpool Biennial 2018.
https://www.artinliverpool.com/events/ib18-george-henry-lees-silvia-battista-persephone/
www.angelomadonna.org
By employing repetition within a circular structure, the performance produces a presence which plays on the possibility and impossibility of a dis/embodied presence to inhabit a space. Eventually Persephone vanishes and her story will be narrated: a contemporary tale of loss and redemption, of myth and ordinary life, of jugglers and lost souls.
Colonization Passes through the Lenses We Use to Understand the Other 2018-2019
Series of gigs in various venues around Liverpool - 208-2019.
The Factory Kitchen @ Invisible Wind Factory;
Kazimier Garden;
81 Kershaw Street.
A River is Never a Matter of Peace
Devised, written and performed by Silvia Battista.
Video by Angelo Madonna.
Dartington Hall, Devon - 2017
In March 2017, I was asked to perform at the Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery at the opening of the show “The Thread that Binds Us: a Collaborative Exhibition by Artists Focusing on the River Mersey from Source to Sea”. The performance was planned for May 2017. To figure out what to do I decided to spend one month and half, two hours a day with the river Mersey. Every day I sat on the same spot of the Southbank of the Liverpool promenade looking at the river Mersey for two hours without speaking with anyone and without moving. I spent time with the river, attending it on a daily basis to notice the details of its existence through stillness. Each day, at the end of the two hours I wrote ten lines with/for and about the river Mersey. With the passing of days I felt in love with this massive flow of water, with the affect that the liquidity and fluidity of its presence had on my consciousness. I became aware of its reactions to different weather conditions, its different “emotional states”, its pollution. In time I became more liquid, more watery-like, as if these hours spent in meditation with the river Mersey were slowly changing my biological being/apparatus. The piece, that I present at Liquidscape 2018 develops from this experience and process and it includes: the reading of the final/edited text; a series of actions with/for the river Mersey water; sound and vocalizations. It will result in a well calibrated repetitive poetic gesture, a dance between reading, pouring, mourning and celebrating; a reverie to the river Mersey and on the possibility of being ourselves liquidscapes.
Icarus Dream 2006-2011
Book: Drawings by Silvia Battista. Poetry by Andrea Lioy
Words and drawings intersecting to reflect on the fate of mythological figure of Icarus.
"Icarus' Dream" is a visual interpretation of the mythological story of Icarus. Fascinated by the symbolic meaning of this figure I drew and animated an imaginary and metaphorical journey of its fall by interpreting it as a shamanic journey into Alice's hole.
Performance: Conceived and performed by Silvia Battista.
Nightingale Theatre, Brighton - 2011
Crypt Gallery, London - 2006
It is a participative performance art piece conceived and performed by Silvia Battista. It was presented at The Crypt Gallery, London (2005) and at the Nightingale Theatre, Brighton (2011). Members of the audience entering the space were invited to sit and wear the headphones provided to watch a short video. The voice and animated character in the video introduced itself as Icarus, told his story and asked visitors to talk to the figure sitting in the space and, through storytelling, helping him to recover from his trauma.
Nightingale Theatre, Brighton - 2011
Crypt Gallery, London - 2006
It is a participative performance art piece conceived and performed by Silvia Battista. It was presented at The Crypt Gallery, London (2005) and at the Nightingale Theatre, Brighton (2011). Members of the audience entering the space were invited to sit and wear the headphones provided to watch a short video. The voice and animated character in the video introduced itself as Icarus, told his story and asked visitors to talk to the figure sitting in the space and, through storytelling, helping him to recover from his trauma.
Animation: Drawings and animation by Silvia Battista. Sound by Mental Ethnic and Silvia Battista. Produced by the Royal College of Art
Royal College of Art, London - 2006
Cultural Centre of Fljotsdalsherad, Iceland - 2007
The Asu Art Museum in Arizona, USA - 2008.
Animation: Drawings and animation by Silvia Battista. Sound by Mental Ethnic and Silvia Battista. Produced by the Royal College of Art
Royal College of Art, London - 2006
Cultural Centre of Fljotsdalsherad, Iceland - 2007
The Asu Art Museum in Arizona, USA - 2008.
Queering the Rosary
Devised by Silvia Battista. Performed by Silvia Battista and Butler. Rosary bead is made by Giovanni Porfido
Modern Panic III Festival, London - 2012
http://www.guerrillazoo.com/modern-panic-3-live-art.html
Queering the RosarySee more
It is a live art/video piece consisting of two hours and half recitation of the rosary prayer to the Virgin Mary using the prayer bead string made by the artist Giovanni Porfido. This prayer bead string is entirely made of wool with each bead resembling human testicles. The object queers the recitation of the rosary in embodiment in connection to sexual energy. The two performers, all black dressed like in the tradition of South of Italy have the faces covered by a black transparent veil.
The Waking Up of an Unplugged Mind
Devised and performed by Silvia battista and Angelo madonna
Hatch Gallery, London - 2011
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