Uma Breakdown
I got nominated to submit a thing to this. Beyond happy to be asked. Brutal word limit.
Statement For Tetley Jerwood Commission, October 2020
My practice lives in the overlap between queer feminist philosophy and theories of literature, speculative horror, and the collaborative exchange of role playing games. As a disabled artist I’m interested in how each of these areas offer their own respective languages and approaches to instability, brokenness, love, and affect.
My work asks how uncertainty and the encounter with difference can be made welcoming and empathetic. I explore this question through open and experimental practices of writing and image making that welcome the audience as collaborator. From these collaborative processes I produce texts, games, diagrams, videos, sculptures, radio plays, lectures and performances. In each instance my work centres expressions of solidarity while inviting the speculation of horror
This year I made a plant sentience RPG for KIM? In Latvia, published an article on a Russian horror game and Hélène Cixous’s writing on death, and wrote a scifi story on trauma, SSRIs and Antonin Artaud. I also finished a PhD mostly about Deleuze, The X Files, and dogs.
Fig1: Planning Diagram for this commission proposal.
Proposal for Tetley Jerwood Commission, October 2020
Working Title: “The project about the neverending Gothic Mansion filled with outlaw mutual care, Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker, Jean Genet’s The Thief's Diary, and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, Tanith Lee’s The Book of The Damned, and the many roles played by Laurie Holden”
I am really excited about bringing together and developing a number of elements that have so far existed only as fragments or ideas, and working on a scale I’ve not had an opportunity to before.
The Gothic Mansion.
The Tetley’s architecture would allow me to work with the folding interrelations between large scale images, objects, and video game works that engage with this subject that sits across queer feminist theory, horror, and role playing games. Normally this space is built on what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identifies as a foundation of suspicion and paranoia. What would it mean to rebuild The Gothic Mansion around Sedgwick’s later ideas about the Reparative that prioritises care?
Audience as Collaborative Saboteur
This commission would give me the resources to create a number of artworks and build the environment in which they engage with one another. I’m very interested in how art can encourage audience agency and bleed out over what might be otherwise considered it’s edges, much like the contents of the haunted house. I want to present a graphic adventure video game that calls the player to meaningfully consider the diagram-like drawing they walked over to get to the computer screen. I want to present audio narratives that don’t resolve the images on the wall but encourage new ways of reading them. I want to present horror that folds into euphoric solidarity. In place of the Gothic Mansions paranoid detective, the audience is supported to be a creative agent of Écriture Féminine, a collaborative saboteur.
Fig2: Planning Diagram for this commission proposal.
Examples of previous relevant work.
Fig3: Screenshot from “Animal Agency”, a graphic adventure game I’m making for Fact, Liverpool, 2020.
Fig4: Documentation image from “All Flesh is Grass” by Una Hamilton Helle, Eltons Kūns, Uma Breakdown, Erik Martinson at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, 2020.
Fig5: “In Country”, digital image, 2019
Fig6: Performance documentation from “Creature of Havoc” at Serf, Leeds, 2017
Fig7: Performance documentation from “TFW: The Formless Wastes” at RES. London, 2017
Fig8: screenshot from “TFW: The Formless Wastes 2”, shown at IMT, London, 2018 and Queens Hall, Hexham, 2019 as part of “Polymorph Other” group exhibition. Full video available here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_5ud6IoVd8&feature=emb_logo
Fig9: screenshot from “Alpha Alpha NineTwenty” which is a text based adventure about interspace diplomacy, disability, and drugs, that I made in 2018. You can play it here
Fig10: “The Estate on the Hill”, digital image, 2020.
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