Experimentica 2024

Under the theme Call to Spring, Experimentica 2024 marks the turn of the seasons toward new life. This edition of the festival invites artists and communities to join in celebrating the ecologies that sustain performance within and beyond the locality. As spring awakens, we come together to imagine collective futures, embracing the chaos and spontaneity from which newness emerges.

SERAFINE1369, internationally renowned for their interdisciplinary work at the intersections of dance, art, philosophy, and divination, will present a captivating new commission. Throughout the building’s former school rooms, south Wales arts collective SCORE will delve into an exploration of performativity and play within the Welsh context in a new site-specific commission.

The Welsh premiere of Future Ritual's A Felling probes concepts of death, rebirth and the transference of energy between bodies and environments. Using her lived experience, connecting with death and grief, Farah Allibhai invites all to My Bhᾶti, an honouring offering hope for the new through cultural practices, earth, seed and food.

Tuning into the body and bodies of others: Forest Silent Gathering by Begüm Erciyas creates an audio-social architecture in which we can be alone together. Naomi Pearce & Stuart Middleton bring an intimate work-in-progress listening experience in which participants are invited to sink into the bog and explore horizontality, and Rebecca Jagoe’s polyvocal performance explores the relationship between queerness and madness across languages, across the different spaces of Chapter for a new work-in-progress.

Ffion Campbell-Davies brings live music, movement and visual art together, incorporating ritual, Qigong and traditional Chinese medicine; and in An Array of Opposites, Anushiye Yarnell invites us to participate in a meditative movement practice to reconfigure ourselves as thinking and feeling organisms.

Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin shares a mail-art initiative containing instructions for private ritual on plantable seed paper as a method of keeping hope. Mythology and reality collide in the collaborative practice of good cop bad cop, who play with the power of the liminal between the 'real' and the ‘imagined’ in their new work, Mince. Drag collective DOOMSCROLL present BDSM Gardener’s Question Time bringing together queer ecologies and club culture.

With contributions ranging from moving image, sculptural installations, photography, print and paintings, Adham Faramawy makes their first solo exhibition in Wales with In the simmering air and the flows of the undercurrent, unfolding across gallery and lightbox spaces. Lou Lou Sainsbury and Holly Slingsby present moving image works across Chapter’s screens, and Kathryn Ashill & Paul Hurley’s interdisciplinary reading group, A Composting Heap, all seek to share and expand on the theme of Call to Spring.

Complementing the Experimentica Festival Hub is the artist-led nomadic bookshop, Yellow Back Books, which provides a range of artists’ books for sale throughout the festival.

Hannah Firth, Artistic Director/ Co-Director of Chapter said:

“We’re thrilled to bring Experimentica 24 to audiences and artists in Wales. Like the turning of the season, Call to Spring offers a new and vital energy, as well as a deep connection to what has been before; acknowledging how our past enriches and sustains us.

Since 2001, the festival has played a key role in the dynamic landscape of live art practice in south Wales and returns in April with a renewed vigour, led by our new curatorial team.

Selected from more than 300 applications, these artists present works across the venue, and a dynamic programme of public engagement invites everyone to contribute to conversations around the work and its wider context.”

Transformation is at the heart of this gathering, as Experimentica 2024: Call to Spring becomes a platform for unsettling, gathering, sowing, and allowing emergent forms and relations to unfurl from the dark.