Paranoid Scores in the Dark - Kem School at ICA London

An invitation extended by our dear Tosia Leniarska, brought us to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London last year, where we contributed to the public program of Gray Wielebinski’s exhibition The Red Sun is High, The Blue Low.

Poster for the exhibition The Red Sun Is High, The Blue Low

In response to the theme of the exhibition, which dealt with paranoia and the revisionary process of reading science-fiction, we suggested an array of performative, somatic and reading tools to be employed in the bunker space. The material on which these tools were excercised, consisted of the writings of Samuel R. Delany - key to the development of Wielebinski’s concept, as well as works by Liz Rosenfeld, whose practice engages with the transformative agency of dark rooms. The aforementioned tools stem directly from the methodologies that we employ during Kem School - our experimental educational program hosted in Warsaw during the summer.

By reading, listening and moving as a group of bodies we tried to search for ways in which somatic exercises can open us up to embodied forms of knowledge. Through this process, we transformed the isolated, fragmentary condition of bunker-induced paranoia into the bountiful collectivity of a darkroom.

(some fragments of the above text were loosely adapted from Tosia Leniarska’s description of the event, to be found here)