Damp, Miasma, and Mould
An evening of fetid practice
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Wednesday 10 December, 18:00-19.45
Deptford Town Hall: Council Chamber
Join us for an evening of decadence and performance in the Council Chamber at Deptford Town Hall (Goldsmiths, University of London). Sophie Sleigh-Johnson will be channelling crackled voices from the other side of the veil, steeped in the heady funk of microbial time. Molly McPhee will invite us into the miasmatic, wading through the pungent orifices of institutional deliquescence. The event will conclude with a panel discussion chaired by Adam Alston, and a Q&A.
Sophie Sleigh-Johnson
In Sophie Sleigh-Johnson’s new book Code: Damp, British sitcom Rising Damp is brought into telepathic connection with English mystical tradition. Its code is found in strains of dilapidated comedy, rising up through the capillaries of centuries’ wallpaper, with moisture the symbolic miasma of the soul. The sitcom’s star, Leonard Rossiter, becomes an arch psychopomp, insufflating the TV tubes with this transgenerational ague, as deliquescent spores of microbial time write themselves in the efflorescence of municipal (g)rot. Summoning frequencies from future past, Code: Damp manifests and harnesses these latent cultural forces: a psychotropic model for obliteration, through the operations of decadent damp undoing.
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Dr. Sophie Sleigh-Johnson is an artist and writer whose multi-disciplinary practice performatively brings popular culture into communion with magic, place, and the esoteric. She holds a PhD from Goldsmiths College, where she teaches as a Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies. Her research practice is distributed across spoken word, sonic environments, printmaking, props, costumes, moving image, and local newspapers. She has exhibited in venues including Focal Point Gallery, The Horse Hospital, and Arcadia Missa, and her work has been screened at The BFI Southbank and The Birmingham MAC. She has published widely in numerous publications, including Performance Research, Darkside, The Leigh Times, Faunus: The Journal of Arthur Machen Society, and The London Drinker.
Molly McPhee
A fetid wind seeps through the hole in the wall, fluttering the wallpaper. (You’ve mentioned this to the landlord-psychopomp but were told it was planned by the Victorians.) Miasmas are, if nothing else, crowd-sourced. Molly McPhee invites you into miasmatic performance within the Deptford Town Hall: as an atmospheric stain across civic, institutional, and carceral orifices, the Council Chamber coughs up a giant fug of catachresis that brings the kinaesthetics of knowledge constructs sustained by suspicion and stigmatisation to the fore. Yet, while the various ways of thinking miasma over two millennia are deeply and perniciously linked to perceptions of morality, disease, decay, segregation and sanitation, Molly’s practice as research proposes that these connections also link miasma to new possibilities of decadent kinship, putrefactions and performance, and ally to unbounded, abolitionist futures.
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Dr Molly McPhee is Lecturer in Applied Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, with expertise in theatre in prisons and at risk communities, and in theatre in health education practices. Her interdisciplinary research brings ecologies of applied theatre into critical correspondence with the fields of abolition geography and atmosphere studies. Across a range of publications, including in Humanities; Ambiances: International Journal of the Sensory Environment, Architecture and Urban Space; Performance Research; Applied Theatre: Women and the Criminal Justice System; Theatres of Contagion, and featured currently on Bloomsbury Drama Online, Molly distils leaks, swamps, decay and miasmas, investigating their relationships to socially engaged and community performance in the UK and internationally. The recipient of Fulbright and Clore Emerging Leader fellowships, she trained at CalArts and University of Melbourne, and was a member of the theatre company Clean Break for six years, working with justice-experienced women and women at risk.
Adam Alston
Dr Adam Alston is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London. He runs the Staging Decadence project (www.stagingdecadence.com), and is Co-Deputy Chair of the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths. He is the author of Staging Decadence: Theatre, Performance, and the Ends of Capitalism (Bloomsbury 2023), co-editor (with Professor Jane Desmarais) of Decadent Plays: 1890-1930 (Bloomsbury 2024), co-editor (with Dr Alexandra Trott) of a special issue of Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies on ‘Decadence and Performance’ (Winter 2021), and author of several chapters and articles exploring decadence and performance. He has produced and curated performance events and club nights at venues including the V&A, Rich Mix, Iklectik, The Box, HERE Arts Centre (New York), and The Albany, and he has also published extensively on immersive and participatory theatres.
Location
Deptford Town Hall: Council Chamber
The entrance to Deptford Town Hall is on New Cross Road, between St. James' and Laurie Grove.
Goldsmiths is located in New Cross, South East London. It is a short walk from both New Cross Gate and New Cross stations (Zone 2) on the main rail network and London overground; about a 7 minute journey from London Bridge and 30 minutes from London Victoria. It is on bus routes 21, 36, 53, 136, 171, 172, 177, 225, 321, 343, 436, 453.
For exact directions to Goldsmiths please see the How to Find Us page on the Goldsmiths website.
For more information about these events, please email drc@gold.ac.uk.