Transpositions

October 24, 2018 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm

In honour of the work of Nobel-prize winning plant scientist Barbara McClintock, we celebrate her key concept of ‘Transpositions’ in an evening of performance, ritual, and artistic exchanges. Responding to the Reproductivities exhibition, performance artist Sophie Seita’s commissioned piece Transpositions will reflect on the concept and choreography of transposition, queer kinship, and corn as a queer plant, ritual, the ritornello, and the cross-pollinating possibilities of flowery metaphors and of planting queer objects. The performance will include spoken text, choreographed movement, interaction with objects, as well as recorded and live sound. Alongside Seita’s performance, we invite the audience to engage with scientific, artisanal and artistic mediations of maize – McClintock’s plant of choice – through the Reproductivities exhibition on display throughout the College. The performance will include an immersive, participatory component and is followed by a Q&A with the artist and curators.

Sophie Seita is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher. Her text- and research-based practice spans poetry, performance, lecture-performance, video, translation, and multimedia collaborations. Her work has recently been presented at Art Night 2018 (Oxo Tower, London), SAAS-Fee Summer Institute of Art, the Royal Academy, Bold Tendencies, the Arnolfini, La MaMa Galleria, Cité Internationale des Arts, Parasol Unit, Company Gallery, and elsewhere. She’s the author of the poetry and performance books Meat (Little Red Leaves, 2015), Fantasias in Counting (BlazeVOX, 2014), and 12 Steps (Wide Range, 2012); the translator of Uljana Wolf’s Subsisters: Selected Poems (Belladonna*, 2017); and the editor of a centenary reprint of The Blind Man (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), named one of the Best Art Books of 2017 by The New York Times. She is also currently a Research Fellow at Queens’ College Cambridge, where she recently finished her monograph Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital, forthcoming from Stanford University Press in 2019.

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Organised by the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc) as part of the Festival of Ideas.

Concept, text, performance, music, dance: Sophie Seita. Costumes, props, and book design: Jasmine Brady. Creative development, live sound, and composition: Caroline Ophis. Dance improvisation: Sarah Kelly.