An Tobar Festival 2022

By Lisette May Monroe, 17.05.2022

Bobbi Cameron's sound installation 'without time without distance without mind' at An Tobar Festival. Image by Sean Campbell.

The poet CAConrad said that for working class people the present does not exist. I often think about how this can be true for all marginalised communities - we use our past to move towards a future, without being afforded the luxury of the present. A moment to stand beside ourselves and let the moments we gather flow through us.

Daughter of Cups in The North is the first iteration of An Tobar’s new annual festival, which this year pulls together ways of sharing, listening and moving between our past, our present and our possibilities. Curated by Artist-In-Residence Bobbi Cameron as an expansion of her exhibition without time, without distance, without mind, the programme explores these ideas through the radical practices of Mele Broomes, Daniella Valz Gen, Evan Ifekoya, Hannah Catherine Jones, Grace Ndiritu, Quinie, Linda Stupart and Sarra Wild.

Incorporating performance, music, visual art, sound installation and film screenings, the 3-day festival swelled into the current, using the body as a vessel to interrogate spiritual histories and make these pasts manifest.

Quinie opens the programme, performing traditional and contemporary Scots folk music which she collects and collages, accompanied on bagpipes and violin by Harry Gorski-Brown. Quinie's voice is both instrument and illusion, taking the forms of the birds. She sings stories of love and journey, of place and of life. Across a moving set, she asks the audience questions: Where do we gather the stories we need to keep and how do we tell them in a way that protects them but also holds them close? How do we not crush them as we do with so many things?

The song of birds narrates the weekend. In Daniella Valz Gen’s workshop audiences move into a circle and talk of nests and gathering, ideas which are also present in Valz Gen’s installation Howl Sing Sigh, at An Tobar. In both spaces, the artists offer acts of collecting as practice of divining, using the potential processes of rituals to bring audiences into a purposeful moment; a space that is held and boundaried in the present.

Where does the body go when we hear something? Can you hear something in the now and hear a sound from your past at the same time? These are prompts presented by Hannah Catherine Jones during their Embodied Listening Sessions. A moment of sonic collective healing, Jones slows down scores to 432Hz, matching the body's own pace.  Frequencies of the body speaking into the body - grounding and rotating us through the present tense. Flattening out the brain. Birds talk again and again and again. Bowls sing. Touch is felt and mentioned and moved.

The screening programme features preservation and persistence, erosion and offering. The films grow through movement and rhythm while taking ideas of documentation and artefact as points of time travel.

Materiality and corrosion in Linda Stupart’s film After the Ice the Deluge melts linear time, exposing the matter of the dead whilst immersing us in the same water that has kept them frozen. Evan Ifekoya’s Undercurrent 528 sees the beat draw us through spaces of touch, intimacy and community, traveling between notions of aliveness using sound as a healing energy to wrap these moments in.

Sophia Al Maria’s Tender Point Ruin uses points of collective histories to ask how we constantly college a self, exploring this as an ongoing remaking in each present rather than a self with a finite ending.

Closing the screenings, Grace Ndiritu’s A Therapeutic Townhall Meeting: Healing the Museum is documentation of a new shamanic performance in which she asks the audience to use the performance as a vehicle to absolve ideas of the individual, using this moment to collapse the timeline of the personal leveling the imbalances of the political and putting collective global action on trial.

Mele Broomes’ performance, Working Reveals: A Live Version of Wrapped Up in This, is a stellar meditation on how we live as an archive. Using dance, movement and voice, Broomes puts forward the story of a womxn on a journey of rebirth swaddled in voices and the guidance of her ancestors. She travels laterally through spaces past, acknowledging that each movement, action, sound she makes in the present will be utilised to guide those that come after on their own path. Living within the framework of expectation of those that came before and within contemporary society, the labour her body is forced to perform also appears in a possible transcendental future.

Moving through the festival there is a return to sound. In Bobbi Cameron’s sound installation without time without distance, without mind the artist harnesses Reiki energy as a means of time travel, channeling the future and nurturing her past. In a charged soundscape Cameron take us as a companion through a narrative of healing, spirtuality and abscence.

Cameron brings together her works and the works of others to hold a space for audiences to meditate on their present, while not ignoring that by being in our present we can sometimes still be in discomfort or in threat. She has made space to disrupt, a place to learn through movement and be impacted by sound in each part of our healing body. It is fitting then, that Daughter of Cups in the North should close with a party, DJed by Sarra Wild. Wild invites us to join them in the now, channeling all of the energy amassed in the previous days to charge the room, demanding that we lock eyes with the moment and notice where we are, suspended in communion with our most present selves.

An Tobar Festival: Daughter of Cups in the North took place between the 29th April - 1st May 2022 in venues across Mull. Bobbi Cameron’s exhibition without time, without distance, without mind is exhibited at An Tobar until Friday 24 June 2022