In the Shadow of the State Events & Performance Programme 2016

27th February 2016, Derry

Legal Drafting Session I led by academic and activist Máiréad Enright

In the Shadow of the State begins in Derry in a private home. This domestic space will be physically and architecturally transformed, mobilizing the aesthetics of secrecy and surveillance. In The Shadow of The State addresses the domestic space as a place of latent power, occupying it for activities such as feminist consciousness-raising and legal speculation at the kitchen table. This first event in Derry focuses on the domestic space, asking if it exists as a site of retreat from the State and its laws, or if it is instead an origin site of that oppression.

March 12th 2016, Derry

The project officially launches with a public performance and vocalisation resonating from the artist’e extensive research and the first Legal Drafting Session. Sound score by Alma Kelliher, award winning composer and sound designer.

May, Liverpool

Legal Drafting Session II

21 July 2016, Liverpool

Liverpool, live online broadcast.
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This live internet broadcast explores historic state violence enacted through gynaecological means. Featuring material culture historian Dr. Lisa Godson and self-identified “cyborg witch” Klau Kinky of Catalan collective Gynepunk, this event identifies the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s as a key moment in the legislation of state violence against women in Ireland and the UK. With this event, the artists and their guests propose a supplanting of the role of the state-sanctioned broadcast into domestic spaces. A transnational audience is invited to this online platform to discuss and challenge the terrestrial illegalities of reproductive rights for women.

The Truncheon and the Speculum is part of In the Shadow of the State, a co-commission of Artangel and Create; also supported by ART: 2016, the Arts Council’s programme as part of Ireland 2016, the centenary of the Easter Rising in the Republic of Ireland , Dublin City Council and for Liverpool: Heart of Glass (St. Helen’s).

August, Dublin

Legal Drafting Session II

September 23, 24 & 25 2016, Dublin

Key Public Event, Pillar Rooms, Rotunda Hospital

This performative event will the main manifestation of the project in Ireland. This performance will focus on the embodied processes of capitalism in the most intimate aspects of life, particularly obstetric systems. This event, with different women participants, will be staged in the city where the active management of labour was pioneered through the targeted use of oxytocin, which regulates the movement of labouring women’s bodies in hospital wards across the world.

October, London

Legal Drafting Session IV

December, London

Final Public Event (date and venue tbc)

In London, at the end of 2016, the project will culminate in a disused courthouse with the sonic performance of the legal, contractual composition developed with the key project collaborators. The staging of this work will incorporate voice, sound, and a series of illegitimate artefacts, including a rachitic pelvis and a Sheela na Gig. This final event represents the hearing of the suppressed and excluded voices from the Shadow of the State.