A study day which brought together artists, writers and historians to explore mysticism, feminism and performance. Programmed in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries as well as producing a new performance.

This chapter from Dark Continent is told through Mnemesoid, an open source software programme named after Mnemosyne, mother of the 9 muses and the symbolic embodiment of memory in Greek mythology, the software was created as an interface for ‘The Eternal Cortex Project’, an aggregated, almost infinite database of experience. Mnemesoid renders the input of language, image and fiction into high fidelity, sensory information that can be experienced from the POV of self, other, animal or object.
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‘Dark Continent’ is the gates to this city out of time, an installation which combines text, film, sculpture, a series of three staged performances and a window through which to see. A gesamtkunstwerk braiding narratives, fictions and mythologies, a Dionysian descent into rapture, ideology, language and flesh into the bottomless pit told through a neanderthal hermaphrodite, a medieval mystic and the woman on the edge of time.

‘Dark Continent’, is an ongoing feminist project, currently iterated through character-led installations, films, performances and texts, it is an experimental and expanded adaptation of Christine de Pizan's 1405 pioneering feminist book, ‘The Book of the City of Ladies’ within which Christine builds an allegorical city for notable women drawn from a medieval conception of history, where fact, fiction and myth are blurred. This non-hierarchical approach also determines the construction of the characters and narrative of ‘Dark Continent’. A ‘City of Women’ is also a construct often revisited by feminist science fiction authors (such as Pamela Sargent in The Shore of Women, Sally Miller Gearheart in The Wanderground and Suzy McKee Charnas in The Mother Lines), has served as a significant narrative device to articulate feminism’s ultimate goals; egalitarian civilizations and realities beyond gender.

Taking the ‘City of Women’ as a point of departure to imagine an alternative history which privileges, sensation and interiority and constructs a possible post-patriarchal future. This very loose adaptation offers an ahistorical, non-linear, non-place, simultaneously internal and geographic, past and future, a city in time but not in space. It proposes an allegorical city of women populated by composite, symbolic protagonists that embody excess and examine 'feminine' subjectivity and experience as well as the potentials of a realism defined by excess and the irrational; qualities traditionally surrounding notions of the “feminine”.