Freedom of Movement Festival 3: The symposium


IKLECTIK presents:

Freedom of Movement Festival

By ‘Unfinished’, with Angharad Davies, Bashir Saade, Bennett Hogg, Claudia Molitor, Eugene Skeef, Steve Beresford and postgraduate artists from Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

Recent political events have served to highlight the fact that borders and freedoms are critically important issues. The Freedom of Movement Festival is a series of events and gatherings bringing together artists and thinkers to consider the significance and problematics of ‘freedom’ from artistic and social perspectives.  New performance pieces, improvisations and talks will explore a range of interrelationships across geographical freedom of movement, artistic freedom and freedom of expression. The festival will focus on the medium of sound and its capacity to disrupt, permeate or circumvent perceived boundaries and norms.  Events will include improvisations, performances of open or text scores, conference performance/presentations and text readings.

Unfinished is a curatorial project by Nell Catchpole and Jan Hendrickse which seeks to explore the boundaries between artist/audience and the artistic/everyday through an ongoing series of open events, performances and publications.

Unfinished aims to generate curiosity, action and renewal.

Festival Events

Throughout the week, new works will be created and performed by postgraduate artists from Guildhall School of Music & Drama alongside guest artists and presenters.

FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT 3: The symposium

Sat 16 March – 10.30am – 6pm

The third event in the series. In this symposium the speakers will present a provocation on ideas about freedom, borders and boundaries followed by group discuss in the afternoon.  The day will end with a performance by renowned musician, Steve Beresford and Guildhall artists.

Presenters: Bashir Saade, Bennett Hogg, Claudia Molitor

In this conference/forum, the speakers will present a provocation on ideas about freedom, borders and boundaries followed by group discuss in the afternoon.  The day will end with a performance by renowned musician, Steve Beresford and Guildhall artists.

Bashir Saade is an Interdisciplinary Lecturer in Politics and Religion at the University of Stirling. He previously held posts at the University of Edinburgh and at the American University of Beirut (AUB). He holds a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London. His teaching and research interests cross between political anthropology and social theory. He studies contemporary Islamic politics while focusing on cultural production and in particular the increasing importance of media technology. He also engages in a genealogical reading of premodern Arabic scholarly texts showing their relevance to the modern condition.  His book, Hizbullah and the Politics of Remembrance (Cambridge University Press, 2016), is an intellectual history of the Lebanese political party.

Bashir is also a multi-instrumentalist music improviser, mostly focusing on the reed-made flute the Ney, and the Clarinet. He’s played in different parts of the world for the past 20 years and recorded with numerous international musicians.

 Bennett Hogg is a composer, improviser, and theorist interested in sound/music and place, and sound/music and nature. He directed “Landscape Quartet” (2012-2014), an AHRC-funded project focussed on sound art in natural environments, and held an Austrian Science Fund  fellowship at Kunst Universitat, Graz, working on the “Emotional Improvisation” project, led by Prof Deniz Peters (2014). His academic writing draws on phenomenology and psychoanalysis, and his creative work ranges from experimental environmental sound works, through free improvisation and sound installations, to a more “conservative” voice in instrumental composition, long-running collaborations with visual artist Mike Collier, and folk music. Recent publications have included “Geographies of Silence” for the Routledge Sound Studies Reader and “They Call Us By Our Names: Technology, Memory and Metempsychosis” for the Oxford Handbook on Sound and Imagination. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University.

 Claudia Molitor is a composer and improviser whose work hovers between music and sound art. Exploring the relationships between listening and other senses as well as embracing collaboration as compositional practice is central to much of her practice. Recent work includes Sonorama with Electra Productions, Turner Contemporary and the British Library, which received a British Composer Award; Vast White Stillness for Spitalfields Festival and Brighton Festival; The Singing Bridge, installed at Somerset House and Waterloo Bridge during the Totally Thames festival; and Walking with Partch for Ensemble MusikFabric at hcmf//; she is currently touring an ever evolving work Decay around Europe and the US. She is the co-founder/director of multi.modal records and is a Senior Lecturer at City, University of London.

 Special Guest: Steve Beresford

Steve Beresford has been a central figure in the British improvising scene for over forty years, working with the likes of Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink, Christian Marclay and Alterations. He has an extensive discography as performer, arranger, composer and producer, and was was awarded a Paul Hamlyn award for composers in 2012.

festival artists include

Angharad Davies

Bashir Saade

Beatriz Ana Rola

Bennett Hogg

Christopher Potts

Claudia Molitor

Da Hye Clara Yang

Dilara Aydin-Corbett

Eugene Skeef

Gerrard Brazell

Hannah Fredsgaard-Jones

Hannah Stewart

Jan Hendrickse

Jane Cheadle

Julia Koelmans

Kendall Perry

Lara Agar

Miguel Morgado Picciochi

Nell Catchpole

Steve Beresford