Lou Lou Sainsbury & Georgiana Cojocaru present their double zine launch & lecture-performance of poetry, essay and diary entries, including the projects The Unstable Condition of Zhong Zhong & Hua Hua and To be emptied out to glorious non-returns.
Taking form of a personal poetic-essay, Lou Lou Sainsbury’s publication & performance The Unstable Condition of Zhong Zhong & Hua Hua, interweaves a spiralling riddle of desire, intimacy and recent developments in non-human primate testing. During a dream, the recent birth of two cloned crab-eating macaques sisters ‘Zhong Zhong’ & ‘Hua Hua’ become precariously enmeshed with news of BMW & Volkswagen funded diesel tests on monkeys. As the cloned primate sisters take host within the strange temporality of their incubation chamber, a personal non-linear journal of love, queerness and animality evokes questions of memory, visibility and the difficulties of whose arms are holding one, and in whose arms one lives in.
Georgiana Cojocaru will present her zine To be emptied out to glorious non-returns, a poetic commentary on how a body can expand and incorporate interactions and experiences with other life forms. Looking at worms, algae, cliffs and shores, the zine explores whether one can imagine a coming-together that knows no bounds. There is a world that grows in this embodied decision to engage with other entities, a world plated by volcanic cinder-like walls of our own selves. A seesawing luminous inertia, a liturgical balance where we finally find our peace.
Photos by Petre Fall.
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.