INTERIOR/INTERIOR was an afternoon of online events that explored connections between the home and the body: opening space to reflect on how events of the pandemic have re-shaped our perceptions of interdependency, protection, and containment. This event expanded upon the notion of a composite home-body, stretching outwards via networked systems (supplying and demanding) and inwards through new modes of self-knowledge and maintenance.

One INTERIOR is the shell - a networked container maintained by labour and producing waste, reaching for community and receiving shopping. Another INTERIOR is the body within, navigating its complex dependencies and desires.

'Through workshops, talks and provocation, we will draw out what these interdependent interiors mean for art practice in its forced proximity to habit and habitat. What can the experience of being interconnected home-bodies teach us about care, production, and resistance?'

INTERIOR/INTERIOR was curated by

Dr Zoë Mendelson (artist and Head of Painting and Printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art)

and Anna Bunting-Branch (artist and Associate Lecturer, Camberwell College of Arts).

The event consisted of 3 parts:
PART 1: CALLING OCCUPANTS:

Artists and writers share their responses to a series of provocations that emerge from the themes of INTERIOR/INTERIOR.
Hosted by Anna Bunting-Branch and Zoë Mendelson, with space for questions and discussion.
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Artist-contributors:
Marita Fraser; Hazel Meyer; Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser); Nastja Säde Rönkkö; Xiuching Tsay

PART 2:
The virus and the expanded field:
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Dr. Zoë Mendelson will present new research into the virus as metaphor, considering applied uses for an examination of its spread, mutation and its ambitions. Drawing on expanded field art practice and the medical, this research uses models from art practice to consider how the site of the pandemic home has become an escape from the viral but also sits in the shadow of its most stark metaphors. Our homes, connected via electricity and forms of commodified exchange, now produce (work, economics) as well as consume, forming buzzing cartographic global drawings stitching domestic spaces to each other across the world. Mendelson shielded for 59 weeks from March 2020 and draws on her experience of the home-as-skin suggesting how wellbeing as a success narrative dissolves the values of productive vulnerability.

PART 3:
Recipes for Disaster
17.30 - 19.30
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Recipes for Disaster will be for up to 20 participants and will include live presentation and break out rooms, with the option to publish your recipe in the event archive.

In this creative writing workshop, we will explore ways to prepare, create and transform in the face of disaster: from personal and political heartbreak to austerity, illness, climate emergency, and whatever else the future may have in store. Thinking about the recipe as a minor genre that embraces both practical instruction and wonderous alchemy, we will write our own recipes for disaster that mix ingredients for sustenance, indulgence, survival and insurrection.

Recipes for Disaster will be led by Anna Bunting-Branch, drawing on her ongoing research into feminist science fiction.