Vacant Possession

We welcome the New Moon with an intermedia evening of film, live experimental music, voice, and ritual action.

Vacant Possession is a fantasy documentary reflecting on the poetics of an abandoned house that is slowly slipping into the marshes near the east coast of England. It documents a tangle of love, landscape, property, power, and decay. Can the dead be dispossessed?

For us, sites and landscapes are alive with past traumas and joys, feelings and passions, nascent futures, hauntings, and magical potential. Our film combines documentary, animation, poetry, photography, field recording, on-site ritual performance, and music.

The energies of New Moon connect and bind us through intention setting and dream ritual and will climax within an improvised finale, the Berlin debut of our improvised voice and electronics duo, Pauper Palace. There will be inexplicable synchronicities.

About us. Jackie Montague and John Bowers have recently established a collaboration, as a writer and a sound artist, to explore experimental film and improvised performance. In particular, our work studies the esoteric aspects of landscape and place, particularly sites of abandonment and loss, as settings for our own DIY ritual magic.

We are informed, inspired and often haunted by the artistic methods of surrealism and the feminist magical practice of women within that tradition (e.g. Ithell Colquhoun and Leonora Carrington), experimental film makers who investigate magical rituals and symbolism (e.g. Derek Jarman and Kenneth Anger), essay film forms (e.g. Chantal Akerman and Chris Marker), and intermedia performance (e.g. Yoko Ono and Fluxus).

In particular, we practice what we call ‘laminamancy’ – studying the effects of layering phenomena, materials, histories, geographies, memories, and ideas to explore how they interact, combining varied artistic forms.

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