“Memory is never shaped in a vacuum; the motives of memory are never pure.” (James Edward Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning). But may memory be shaped in an incubator? Living, local and non-local, communicative and contained?
The incubator works as a fluid environment that refuses to solidify, an inert and living container of processes, transformation and documented inhabitation. The incubation chamber is written ‘live’ and inscribed, a container to be studied, documented and adapted in utero.
Working from a multidisciplinary orientation of moving image, sound, text and live performance (informed by biosemiotics, materialist philosophy and queer studies), artist & writer Lou Lou Sainsbury and writer & curator Georgiana Cojocaru consider recent birth of two cloned monkeys Zhong Zhong & Hua Hua. In turn, exploring the possibilities of building collaborative communities between the spectrum of the live and inert matter, the public and private communication of the incubation chamber, and what could be at stake in the unstable condition of living in visibility.
Biographies
Lou Lou Sainsbury
Lou Lou Sainsbury is a non-binary artist, curator and activist based in Margate, UK. Their work spans through video, performance, text, installation and sound, curatorially situated in collaborative forms of participatory learning and artists’ film. In 2016, they founded the moving image research & screening platform Synthetic Ecology. In 2017, they were an Associate Artist at Open School East and have since been focusing on experimental writing and video, exploring queer subjectivities, systemic violence and histories of non-human representation. Their projects have been shown in film festivals, galleries and activist spaces including Alchemy Film Festival, Scotland (2017), Mount Florida Screenings (2017), Cinecity, Brighton (2016) and Towner Gallery (2015).
Georgiana Cojocaru
Georgiana Cojocaru is an art writer and occasional curator based in Bucharest. She studied The Contemporary postgraduate programme at the University of Kent and completed it with a thesis on the instances of generic blackness in contemporary art. Her articles appeared in Revista ARTA, The Good Life, Burlington Magazine and The Glory Hole.