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ex​:​lab - Caustic Ophelia

from The Brick Dialogues by Rolf Hughes, Rachel Armstrong

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about

Delving even further into the ‘character’ of the metabolisms within complex fabrics, The Brick Dialogues, a series of collaborations with Rolf Hughes for the Adaptive Architecture Exhibition at Nottingham Trent University, cast the matter within ‘living’ bricks as characters from Shakespeare's plays. The first, Caustic Ophelia (2018), is a perspex ‘brick’ and ‘open coffin’ for Ophelia’s splendid organic material body. Slowly decomposing in the gallery, the tragic heroine’s material namesake becomes soil as she ‘drowns’ in her soft surroundings. Through headphones, the audience hears multiple voices released by the composting process. Responsible in many different ways for transforming Ophelia’s materials into some form of ‘new’ life, these nonhuman agents transform Ophelia's tragedy into a new beginning through the composting process. Hughes' ‘brick dialogues’ are transgressively optimistic, whispering about the eternal exchanges of renewal that link the cycles of life and death such as love, fertility, restlessness and the ‘emotionally charged’ nature of matter in flux. [Text: Rachel Armstrong].

lyrics

Caustic Ophelia
[from The Brick Dialogues]

– Let us acknowledge it.

[Long pause]

– A spore of pollen inside a balloon.
– Glass of fashion, mould of form.
– A drum inside a bloody room.
– The whole world becoming stone.

– Did you think it might rise?
– I wanted to sink.
– Here’s rue for you; there’s none for me.
– The eyes of poor Ophelia. Blasted ecstatic.
– Whatever worm eats or impregnates–
– I sucked that honey–
– under that bed–
– his breezy vows
– sweet bells jangling
– caressing my river’s silvery skin
– disordering the petals you plucked
– these petals I plucked from the wind
– mulching – always something turning to rot, or–?

[Pause]

– The blue bacteria.

[Pause]

– Blasted mulch.
– She’s drying out.
– Dying to dry out.
– Caustic wit?

[Pause]

– Eat me. It’s heat-seeking.
– An open coffin within which many rivers.

[Pause]

– Heartbreak hotel. Caustic soda. Copper. [Pause] Ophelia!
– What?

[Pause]

– Nothing.
– Nothing will come of nothing!

[Pause]

– Good night, ladies. Good night, sweet ladies.
– Good night.

[Pause]

– This artificial heart.
– What of it?
– It’s not nothing.

[Pause]

– Good night, good night.

credits

from The Brick Dialogues, track released May 7, 2018
Rolf Hughes (prose poem and sound); Rachel Armstrong & Rolf Hughes (voices); Rachel Armstrong (design and creation of living brick)

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ex:lab Ghent, Belgium

ex:lab creates new experimental practices, pedagogies and performances, often involving improvisations and/or collaborators who share a sense of indifference to conventions.

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