Block9 at Glastonbury 2022: Todd Edwards @180fact

Uploaded July 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

Block9 at Glastonbury 2022: Todd Edwards

$Alexandra Koumantaki - Gaze The work of Greek artist Alexandra Koumantaki is characterised by constructed interstices between both the natural and the technological and the present and the past. Site specific installations in uninhabited natural spaces see the Hyperlink curator drawing together synthetic material and geological phenomena, reaching back to the ancient cultures of Greece and Egypt that have shaped her native Crete and her current base of Athens, while gesturing towards speculative futures with sci-fi sculpture and artificial light. In Gaze, Koumantaki collaborates with Simon Kounovsky, also known as CGI artist, sculptor and filmmaker Axonbody, in a hybrid work inspired by ancient Hellenic tablets, video game aesthetics and J.G. Ballard’s foundational work of climate fiction, The Drowned World. Conceiving of a world in which humanity is long gone, yet their indelible mark remains in scraps of abandoned technology, Koumantaki and Axonbody reckon with the urgent reality of climate catastrophe using the signifiers of lost and virtual worlds, reconfiguring technology as contemporary mythology. Installed near the ancient sanctuary of Hera in the Corinthian Gulf, the artists flatten the freak weather and global warming of the present into ancient myth, illuminating the fragile scale of human history with orange alien light. “What divine trace of this omnipresent technology remains among the shimmering ash of urban rubble, the global desert of networked ruins, and the forsaken wreckage of the cloud’s ambient hyper-architectural infrastructure?” asked Deptford gallery Gossamer Fog in their text accompanying Koumantaki’s recent London show, Shimmering Ashes Whispered Twilight Tears. “What orphaned relics of divine computation persist like midnight sun? What numinous drone idles in submerged temples?” Flecked with salt spray, reflected in the wine dark waters of Corinth and refracted through squalls of eerie noise, courtesy of Morgan Hall and Koumantaki herself, the strange light of ‘Gaze’ shines as the residual essence of the god in the machine of industrial society, a technologically-mediated encounter with a new numinous, leaking through the cracks left behind by catastrophe. “The light installation symbolises computation and human creation,” notes Koumantaki. “The technology as godly epiphany where human mind overcame their nature. Technology as a trace that humanity existed.” For more information about Alexandra Koumantaki you can visit her website and follow her on Instagram. You can find Axonbody on Instagram. Gaze Credits: Alexandra Koumantaki Gaze, HD video, 2:10’ 2023. Filmed by Simon Kounovsky Edited by Thanos Trifonidis Original soundtrack by Morgan Hall and Alexandra Koumantaki$

Azu Tiwaline & Defasten - Live at MIRA 2021

L I M – BUBU (produced by RIVA) [Official Video]

$Holly Childs & Gediminas Žygus - ,Throw For the 2022 edition of Rewire Festival, writer and artist Holly Childs and composer and sound artist Gediminas Žygus commissioned a new video work from filmmakers Marijn Degenaar and Nicola Baratto, to accompany a new live performance that would debut at The Hague’s foremost experimental music and arts festival. The result was ‘, Throw,’ an audiovisual composition that started life towards the end of 2021, but that has gathered new, devastating resonance over the first few months of 2022. Developed from a poem that Childs wrote in the heat of the summer on visiting Odesa, Ukraine back in 2018, ‘, Throw’ is a reflection on fleeting moments of desire entangled inextricably with an intoxicating sense of place, as well as love letter to and from Odesa, an invocation of the city in both the interiority of the viewer and of a memory of its exterior physicality, caught out of time. “Odesa is a beautiful and often mythologized city in literature, and itself an influence on modern literature as it was a hub for a lot of writers and poets throughout the 19th and 20th century,” explain Childs and Žygus. “After we invited Nicola and Marijn, together we started adapting the poem to a musical composition in December 2021 with the idea that we would shoot the video in Athens (we decided to film there in order to get plenty of sunshine in early spring). It was just meant to be a spiritual homage to the magic of this Black Sea trading and tourist city. But the composition took on a completely different meaning as we worked on it, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine escalated in the last week of February.” Centering around a yearning dialogue between two voices, one of them director and performer Marijn Degenaar ‘, Throw’ refracts sunlit vignettes of the city on the Black sea, focusing imagery through a lens clouded by heat haze and sea spray. In the context of the unremitting brutality of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, the melancholy nostalgia that steeps each of the work’s voices speaks to unbelievable tragedy, the longing of its protagonists expanding into a eulogy for peace in a country shrouded by war and a sun-tinged prayer of hope for a return to the light. “We were devastated for our friends in Ukraine,” Childs and Žygus continues. “We had scheduled to shoot the video in early March in Athens; working on it became a way of dealing with anger, fear and grief. Remembering what Odesa is, was, and will be when invasion is over.” In this sense the esoteric directions given by the film’s protagonists work to locate Odesa both in memory and, more urgently, in the transformational phase the city has been thrust into. The search for the city is also a search for those who know the city as it has been, as well as how it can be. “The characters who voice the track triangulate physical materials in a quest to find *you*, the one who is missing, describing to you where they are, using what’s close at hand as echolocation, radar, a verbal map, bouncing locational information between available landmarks,” explains Childs. “And what are the most significant landmarks? The sun, the moon and the earth. This feeling of triangulation begins and ends with celestial elements.” Bloody toes and towels on the shore serve as talismans of a specific time, just as the pontoon, the bistro and the dolphinarium are elevated to totems of a specific space, markers by which to navigate the sun and the sea. You can find Nicola Baratto, Holly Childs, Marijn Degenaar and Gediminas Žygus on Instagram. For more information about Rewire Festival, follow them on Instagram and visit their website. , Throw Credits: Music and Text – Holly Childs & Gediminas Žygus Video – Marijn Degenaar & Nicola Baratto Voices – Danae Io, Marijn Degenaar Performance – Naya Ferentinou, Marijn Degenaar, Yannis Iasonidis Costumes – Serapis Maritime Jewellery – Sankto Leono Production Coordination – Viktor Gogas Mixed and Mastered – James Ginzburg Nicola and Marijn would like to thank Bend Studio, Despina Pavlaki, Yannis Iasonidis, Manolis Lemos, George Tigkas, Jola, Ilias Sanidas, Easton West, Yiannis Mouravas. Shout out to Poseidon too. Commissioned for the 2022 edition of Rewire Festival. © & ℗ Subtext / Multiverse LTD. 2021$

Heith - A Venus Flytrap in the circus lodge