Rallying under the title Sluice Seyðisfjörður: World-Building, 17 projects will exhibit over 200 artists in 11 venues around Seyðisfjörður from 23 to 25 May 2025.

Infrastructural Futures is a durational radio broadcast, hosted by Sluice State Emergency Management Agency in partnership with LungA School & Seyðisfjörður Community Radio - a shared digital and analogue broadcasting platform located in the village of Seyðisfjörður on the east-coast of Iceland - hosted, nurtured and initiated by an open-ended international community.

Infrastructural Futures uses Vinay Gupta’s Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps as a loose structural framework.

‘These maps were originally designed to allow someone to orientate themselves around the infrastructure and they exist inside in the event of a crisis. The way it does this is by plotting the six ways to die: too hot, too cold, illness, injury, hunger, and thirst. If you’re not dying of one of these six things, then you’re going to be dying of old age. Then what it goes on to do is that it puts the individual at the centre of the map and then concentrically moving out from the individual, we move through those spaces up to the world level. And then it maps infrastructure, or the means of not dying, against those concerns.’

This framework will be crossed with a RPG style narrative to plot and structure the selected audio works. The result will be an emergency broadcast into the void. The future of the world is at stake. The public must be warned. 

As part of  Infrastructural Futures, I am presenting four audio / text works. The spoken words and sounds are an extension to the body-material worlds I create. Taking the unique language that a material transmits, these works become a mixture of material soundscapes, that mingle with the words and phrases I obsessively collect and combine, letting them rub up against each other, constructing them into type of ‘sonic material’. Some of the audio works embrace the voice alone, but speak to us of these body-material worlds.

Selected Artists / Audio:

Will Gresson + Iulia Boșcu / Disinformation / Jay Goodbrave (comm.Possible Worlds) / Corridor8 / Cos Ahmet / TMLE / Ruth Jones / There Are No Birds Here / Beth Ross / Con: temporary Quarters / Jim Ricks / Ari Kerssens / Oliver Payne + Tazelaar Stevenson / Elena Botts (unknown sound collective) / Nicola Colclough / Meitheal / Kimbal Bumstead / Ambitions Graveyard / Yarmonics / TLK (Od Arts Festival) / Geography of Colour / LungA School / Sarah Wishart

The Sluice State Emergency Management Agency transmitted the selected artists audio pieces for the duration of the expo, interdispersed with other live elements. The listening experience was available online via the Sluice website, on Seyðisfjörður Community Radio, or via the radio station on FM 107.1

About Sluice Seyðisfjörðu Expo

The eleventh edition of Sluice’s peripatetic international expo is alighting in the far east of Iceland in the isolated town of Seyðisfjörður (population 670). Sluice Seyðisfjörður is an international expo of artist and curator-led projects each addressing the concept of world-building as a means to explore how we build worlds within our own. How these re-imagined, alternative worlds reflect back at us our dissatisfaction with the world as-is and points towards utopic/dystopic alternates. We recognise the danger of the current historical moment, and also its potential.

About Sluice

Sluice is a non-profit initiative based in the UK, led by artists and curators. Since 2011 Sluice has collaborated exclusively with other artist and curator-led projects, collectives and non-profit initiatives. We create multi-faceted events around the world, focusing on the local in a transnational context in order to examine artist-led culture.

To coincide with the Sluice Seyðisfjörður: World-Building Expo, a special Spring / Summer 2025 Issue under the title of ‘World-Building’, accompanies the entire expo. Details available on the Sluice website. Infrastructural Futures is part of Sluice Seyðisfjörður: World-Building Expo 2025, and was developed in partnership with LungA School, and broadcast live as a radio take-over in conjuncion with Seyðisfjörður Community Radio.

To listen to a broadcast extract featuring my four audio works, including an introduction, please click here

sluice.info/events/seydisfjordur
seydisfjordurcommunityradio.net

When I asked the artists,  Cos Ahmet & Gary Finnegan, if they'd like to show their work for ‘We Are All Going To Die’, I also asked them to not show their work, in a sense. In response, they turned up at the gallery with two mugs. On those mugs were stills from their collaborative film. Stills from the film I asked them not to show. The reason being, that I didn't want any video works in this particular show.

I was really excited when they opened the box and produced the mugs. I felt that Cos and Gary were also happy, a bit giddy; and a fragrance of mischievous playfulness surrounded the action of making and revealing the mugs. A piece of novelty merchandise from a film. Nothing serious. A tongue in cheek moment.

But, underneath all that, I feel the mugs have a harmonious existence within the ideological and aesthetic fabric of the exhibition. I feel they are saying something. It's all indeed a novelty, until it becomes routine. I wonder if we collect items to signify our reluctance to let go and accept that such a moment is gone? Grasping, not with our hands but through objects. With each item, a jigsaw of distorted memory is constructed; an amalgamation of historical fragments consumes the now; always chasing the novelty and running from routine. Yet without realising, the chasing and the running becomes routine. And, just as the mugs are empty of liquid, the routine is empty of content.

For me, the mugs are emblematic of the conundrum of life; a life plagued with novelty yet empty of content. With that said, please don't assume one describes the mugs as such. While the mugs themselves are indeed designed to be a novelty in a sense, when observed, they become a vessel for broader consideration and questioning beyond their existence as a mug. A book that springs to mind is: The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yangai. Thank you for the mugs!

‘We Are All Going To Die’, curated by Stephen Sheehan at Existential House, 26th August - 30th  September 2022. The exhibition featured works by artists: Cos Ahmet, Jay Chesterman, Gary Finnegan, Leo Fitzmaurice, Tim Foxon, Jeffery Knopf, Rory Macbeth, Daniel Marsh, Joe Fletcher Orr, Amy Russell, Stephen Sheehan, Luke Skiffington.

Existential House is an independent, nomadic art gallery run by the artist, writer and curator Stephen Sheehan, that aims to facilitate challenging and experimental work. Existential House was previously located at Unit 1, Woodside Business Park in Birkenhead, Wirral. However, conceptually, Sheehan abandoned that space and is experimenting with the idea of a nomadic gallery that exists and operates outside the physicality of a confined space.

While operating within the unit, we offered artists space and support to challenge and push their own ideologies and practice to broaden the context of art making and the relationship ones art has within society. Existential House not only facilitated exhibitions but accommodated the running of educational programmes and openly worked with educational institutions to broaden the conceptual landscape within the field of Art and beyond. This is something we intend to continue doing. 

All exhibitions ran for a three week period, as well as facilitating shorter exhibitions, one off performances or one day events. Existential house took a keen interest in works that explored the existential and posed questions towards the reality of existence. 

Images: Banner depicting an installation view of ‘We Are All Going To Die’, curated by Stephen Sheehan; Installation and detail views of ‘Hello Russell I + II’, in situ, and detail video stills, used for the mugs, made in collaboration during their Masters Graduate Residency at Static Complex, Liverpool.

existentialhouse.com

Cos Ahmet’s biome focuses on the skin, its many functions and manifold appearances. Starting from his own skin, Cos reflects on the largest human organ – an organ which embodies and protects a life system, namely the body.  While the skin has always been populated by bacteria and thus functions as a life system in itself, the pandemic is transforming it into a much-feared zone.

We are increasingly threatened by the sweat that passes through its pores and the microbes it may share. In light of the current situation, we recall the history of touch, in particular the centuries-old convention of the handshake – a tactile encounter between two human beings, expressing mutual respect and the intention of not harming each other. This very ritual is now shunned; touch is being avoided for the risk of possible contagion. By zooming into the skin, Cos points at the vulnerability of the life system that it exposes. He asks us to reflect on the consequences of touch, the meeting of one skin and another. The risk of being harmed stands next to the possibility of harming others, aggressivity next to involuntary injury. 

Yet, there is another sensation emanating from the coloured photographs, a feeling that works subtly against these negative, pandemic-led associations. The close-ups stimulate haptic viewing. As readers, we’re gently touching the surface of the tracing paper with the eyes. The offer of contact made by the work points to the emotional warmth that touching can imply. Exposing one’s skin to another signifies openness, an interest in connection and exchange with other bodies. Cos emphasises this function of the skin when bringing different skins in contact with each other. In his biome, hairy skin meets hairless skin, human skin is touched by nonhuman skin. 

When turning the pages, the reader’s skin touches another skin – the skin of the paper. Permeable to liquids of all kinds, paper is as porous as skin. It absorbs fat, dirt and colour, and it tears if not treated with care. If touched wrongly, it cuts into the skin of the reader, thus mirroring the ambivalence inherent in human skin. As a site of creative expression, Cos’s biome also demonstrates the function of skin as a carrier of inscriptions. Alongside papyrus, it was animal skin on which letters were engraved in ancient times, and in many cultures, skin is still used for mark making, whether for political, social or aesthetic purposes. 

Skin, however, is never a blank sheet – it is always culturally and politically coded. Whether through colour, texture or surface structure, skin triggers assumptions about the life system that it epitomises. It speaks about race and cultural identity, religion, privilege and work. Often times, skin serves as a marker – it situates us in time and in space. Wrinkles indicate age, skin colour suggests geographic origin. Frequently, these assumptions are misguided, resulting from deeply entrenched prejudices. If we understand skin as a text, it’s probably told by an unreliable narrator. We can never be sure about the clues that it seems to give us. We don’t know where it came to life and if it has been consciously or unconsciously altered. Cos makes this uncertainty a central element of his work. In view of his biome, we are unable to picture the being that lives through and with the skin represented here. Knowing about its relation to the artist’s body, we may situate it in the Western world, and we may suppose that it’s young rather than old. But we cannot confirm that these assumptions are true.

Looking at the close-up photographs, we cannot even be certain that the skin depicted belongs to a human being. Partly covered with a silver gloss, partly consisting of flaps of skin sewn together, the images trigger questions about the boundaries between humans and nonhumans. What are the features of human skin, and where does it meet its nonhuman counterpart? How far are human and nonhuman skin entangled, defying possible distinctions from the outset? What’s the role of the artist in this context, and what does this say about the creation of life systems? On the page, we find no definite answers to these questions. Cos’s biome provides multiple pores for entry and exit, and it encompasses many layers of skin – each of them suggesting another response. Touch it, let it touch you, and you’ll surely find out more about the life system that we call skin. 

About Enzyme 2: Thinking of the periodical as part of an intellectual work of digestion, artists Jorgge Menna Barreto and Joélson Buggilla proposed Enzyme magazine for their Liverpool Biennial commission project. Artists  Cos Ahmet,  Abbie Bradshaw and  Linda Jane James, along with curator Sarah Kristin Happersberger, were invited to collaborate on Enzyme 2, that would become the Life Systems issue. Each worked on a biome relating to the theme of systems – bodily, environmental and social. ‘Life Systems’ became a meeting point to connect their practices, share ideas, harvest and feed. Each artist produced a section of the magazine, and translated their contribution into a two-hour online Life Systems public event under the banner of ‘Digesting Life Systems Lecture Series’.

Jorgge Menna Barreto, Ph.D. (b. 1970, Araçatuba, Brazil) is an artist and educator whose practice and research has been dedicated to site-specific art for over 20 years. Menna Barreto approaches site-specificity from a critical and South American perspective, having taught, lectured, and written extensively on the subject; he has participated in multiple art residencies, projects and exhibitions worldwide.

Sarah Kristin Happersberger , (b. Heppenheim, Germany) is a researcher and curator based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Happersberger has a background in art history and specialises in time-based art, socially engaged art and collaborative practices. Happersberger was invited as a guest editor for Enzyme 2: Life Systems, a durational project by Jorgge Menna Barreto and Joélson Buggilla, with collaborating artists: Cos Ahmet, Abbie Bradshaw, Linda Jane James, Bonnie Ora Sherk and Newton Harrison, commissioned for 11th Edition Liverpool Biennial 2021: The Stomach & The Port, curated by Manuela Moscoso, 19 May - 21 June 2021.

Images: EH-pih-DER-mis by Cos Ahmet. Skin Biome, depicting human / non-human skins printed on translucent vellum. Article Photo: Bia Braz. Enzyme 2: Life Systems, made in collaboration with Jorgge Manna Barreto and Joélson Buggilla, was presented at the 11th Edition of Liverpool Biennial 2021, The Stomach & The Port, curated by Manuela Moscoso.               

liverpoolbiennial.com         

jorggemennabarreto.com     

In 2015, Performa, in collaboration with The Ray Johnson Estate, presented ‘Please Add To and Return To’. This exhibition was staged at Printed Matter in New York, and was the culmination of Performa’s 2015 mail art re-activation project celebrating the life and work of artist Ray Johnson, one of the most revered underground artists of the last half of the 20th century.

During the pandemic and first set of lockdowns in 2020, Ray Johnson’s legendary mail art project ‘Please Add To And Return To’, was once again resurrected. When the artists’s iconic templates were placed back by Performa in circulation in 2015, participants were invited to draw, collage or otherwise ‘add to’ them and ‘return’ them to Ray Johnson c/o Performa.

Five years on, this homage was further extended by the Ray Johnson Estate and Performa. Altering the project for the digital age, Performa situated the templates in monthly art publications, local newspapers, and online as PDF files, and included, ‘Please Add Hair to Cher’; ‘The Starn Twins’; ‘Andy Warhol Interview’ and ‘Ray Johnson Silhouette’. Altered templates are being accepted on a rolling basis, and are still being posted on The Ray Johnson Estate website and social media pages using the hashtag #PleaseAddTo, as a place where to follow the evolution of this project.

Background information

Ray Johnson (1927-1995) was a seminal Pop Art figure in the 1950s, an early conceptualist, and a pioneer of mail art. His preferred medium was collage, that quintessentially twentieth-century art form that reflects the increased (as the century wore on) collision of disparate visual and verbal information that bombards modern man. rayjohnsonestate.com

Performa is a multidisciplinary non-profit arts organization, founded by art historian RoseLee Goldberg in 2004, dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of 20th-century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the 21st century, engaging artists and audiences through experimentation, innovation, and collaboration. performa-arts.org

Printed Matter Inc. was founded in 1976, and is the world’s leading non-profit organization dedicated to the dissemination, understanding and appreciation of artists’ books and related publications. printed matter.org

Images: Cos Ahmet, ‘#PleaseAddToAndReturnTo’, 2020 - a series of contributions using Johnson’s familiar templates that were circulated by The Ray Johnson Estate & Performa, combining them with a variety of found and appropriated imagery, including resources from the artist’s own archive, as his additions. These contributions were posted online alongside a plethora of submissions, via social media channels and to the Ray Johnson Estate project’s growing archive.