What You Will Watch and Hear: Musarc + Jenna Sutela + Amina Abbas-Nazari. Lisson Gallery, 2 June 2023, 6–8pm

In the galleries, Musarc will perform a score by Jenna Sutela entitled O M A I G S T R N, where the artist translates life strategies deployed by slime mould into components and instructions for a vocal performance. Sutela’s work with slime mould is grouped into an ongoing project called ‘Orgs—Organization, Organism, Orgasm’. In performances, she constructs patterns, pathways and ‘many-headed’ readings from the letters in these words and the anagrams they can form. Although slime is absent as material, it is present as method, or reference, inspiring phase-shifting, decentralised speech, improvisation and feedback loops.

In the gallery’s sculpture courtyard at 27 Bell Street, the ensemble will perform What You Will Watch and Hear, a score by Amina Abbas-Nazari. The piece sets singers and the audience hurtling along concentric trajectories around a rustling bamboo sun in a collective meditation on how to interpret climatic events that are so complex and massively distributed across space and time that they are beyond the grasp and understanding of the individual. Musarc and the audience come together to form different constituents of the ‘Whole’ (much as a choir does), each performing and embodying a different perspective on which to watch and hear in the same event.