Venue: Queercircle
Website
A new site-specific installation is coming to Queercircle from February 2023.
Created by Spanish artist Rafael Pérez Evans, ‘Dust Bathers’ promises to bridge two surplus communities and their respective sites of unrests – those of agricultural workers protesting on the streets, and the dancefloors of Queer nightlife.
Pérez Evans will present a new experimental installation which will embody untamed, dirty gestures of resistance. By metaphorically draining the technicolour spectacle of the LGBTQ+ rainbow, Pérez Evans will invite audiences to dust bathe in earthy tones as an exercise in imagining alternative horizons. Dust bathing is an animal behaviour characterised by rolling or moving around in dust, dry earth or sand, with the purpose of removing parasites, maintaining healthy skin or transmitting chemicals to mark territory.
Visitors will first enter the Queercircle exhibition space via industrial-sized, see-through PVC strip curtains, usually used to refrigerate large spaces in the industrial food industries, but also reminiscent of the entrance of now-closed East London gay bar The Joiner’s Arms. The gallery floor will be heaped with earthy material. Borrowing the machinery and language of agricultural workers, at one side of the room, a long conveyor belt connected to a large industrial hay blower will be installed. Once a day during opening hours, visitors will be invited to load earthy material with their bare hands onto the conveyor belt. Staff will turn on the machine and the conveyor belt will feed the earthy material into the blower, creating an ephemeral dust cloud, temporarily bathing the gallery and engulfing visitors in earthy tones. Outside of these scheduled activations, audiences will be invited to roll, shake, dance and dust bathe at their leisure.
This exhibition concludes Queercircle’s inaugural year-long programme cycle centred around the theme of ecology.
Website & BookingVenue Information
Area: East London0.1, Building 4, 3 Barton Yard, Soames Walk, Design District, Greenwich, London, SE10 0BN
Underground & Trains: North Greenwich
Buses: 108, 129, 132, 161, 188, 422, 472, 486
