LAMA / Black Box
21 > 25 SEP 2026 / 10h00 > 14h00
20 Participants
Applications until SEP 13 HERE
British artist Julia Bardsley presents Black Box Curiosities + Enchantments, a laboratory emerging from her research project The Abyss System.
Amidst diagrams, maquettes, choreographies, and performative fictions, participants are invited to enter and explore an “abyssal” world through an approach that investigates the creative process as an act of evocation and the cultivation of conditions for wonder – in | out of darkness.
The workshop includes focusing exercises that support seeing, listening, noticing, and imagining; slow-time guidance of attention for mindful observation and the capturing of details; creating visual maps of thought and translating them into scores for performative choreographies; and developing black-box texts through real-time dictation and transcription.
The challenge may also involve working in or through darkness, with eyes closed or covered, stimulating other capacities for perception and concentration, as well as explorations that push the boundaries of the body, expanding the potential of physical form, and working with processes of folding, sewing, cutting, gluing, joining, undoing, and reorganizing materials, bodies, and objects.
Julia Bardsley works at the intersection of performance, pinhole photography, video projection, sculptural objects, psychological clothing, and hybrid personas.
Notable works include: The Divine Trilogy: Trans-Acts, Almost The Same (fierce rehearsals for violent acts of culture), and Aftermaths: a tear in the meat of vision (presented in London, Glasgow, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, Croatia, Belgium, and Italy); meta-FAMILY (Brazil, UK, Belgium, Slovenia), and Medea: darkmatterevents (Brazil and UK).
Under the creative platform The House of Wonder & Panic, she developed a series of real-time, long-duration processual events titled Reading Rooms. These pieces reinterpret texts of a political, philosophical, and entomological nature. The third in the series, An Apian Paradox, evoked a bee-party inspired by a BJ beehive, proposing an ecology of creativity, pleasure, and feminine “bee-ing” (London, Lisbon, Birmingham).
Her current project is The Abyss System. The first pieces in the series, Elliptical Abyss Ellipses #3 and M[Eye] Abyss [i]DEA #1, premiered at the Peopling The Palaces festival in London in 2024 and 2025. The final part, Apis Abyss Anomalies #2, will be presented at the Ceremony Festival in London in November 2026.
