Philip Speakman

Tell

peripatetic story telling sessions

2018 - 2019

past events:

Tell5

F.A.T. Studios community action project

AMP Gallery

London

10/11/19

Tell2066

2 channel audio

29:47

2019

made for Art Licks Weekend x TACO! Radio Show

aired 20/10/19

hosted by Gonçalo Lamas and Andrew Wyatt, including a reading from Pond (2015) by Claire-Louise Bennett, with stories told by Viana Gaudino, Caterina Avataneo, and Helle Tviberg reading from The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986) by Ursula K. Le Guin. Music by Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton

Trinidadian exorcisms, something infectious from the archive, and insights into human evolution and story telling.

Hosted by in.oscilation.

Tell4

Wells Projects

as part of 'Salamander Skin'

London

29/09/19

with Isobel Adderley, Billy Sassi, Charlie Wood, Izabel Alsina Reynolds, Viana Gaudino and Chi Bagtas

Beans and mother daughter cycles, a traffic collision reenacted, slow worms and histories most famous mother fucker, the death of two guard dogs and a Filipino abattoir.

Tell3: Future Primitive

Gossamer Fog,

as part of 'Future Primitive'

London

23/06/19

with Rosie Woodhouse, Andrew Wyatt and Gonçalo Lamas, Caterina Avataneo, Jess Heritage and Miriam Austin

Dreams of Marx, firework scars and constellations, contracting mushrooms, precognitive pets and the church built by your grandfather.

Tell2

a friend's front room, Honor Oak

London

21/03/19

with Miki Holloway, Dave Malkin, Misha Farrant, Eleni Papazoglou, Helle Tviberg and Micheal Taiwo

Collective enunciation, cold war ghost broadcasts, pregnant sex with Disney villains, remembering Katherine Araniello, Catford's prefabs and past selves.

Tell

our shared garden, Brockley, London

02/10/18

with Harry Bix and Hannah le Feuvre, Miki Holloway, Olive Kan, Jack Solloway and Helle Tviberg, Madi Walsh, Andrew Wyatt and Gonçalo Lamas

The man with 100 mothers, attempts at group storytelling, the two separate Tviberg families on Tviberg Island, sharing and poisoning a parish church with elderberry juice, Mother by Carmen Maria Machado, and shared identical scares.

…a shifting and shining creature that nobody had ever caught but that many said they had glimpsed in the depths of mirrors, part of a larger myth that goes back to the legendary times of the Yellow Emperor. In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other. They were, besides, quite different; neither beings nor colours nor shapes were the same. Both kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in harmony; you could come and go through mirrors. One night the mirror people invaded the earth. Their power was great, but at the end of bloody warfare the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. He stripped them of their power and of their forms and reduced them to mere slavish reflections. Nonetheless, a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off. Deep in the mirror we will perceive a very faint line and the colour of this line will be like no other colour. Later on, other shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated. Others believe that in advance of the invasion we will hear from the depths of mirrors the clatter of weapons.

(Abridged from The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges.)

Philip Speakman

Tell

peripatetic story telling sessions

2018 - 2019

​

past events:

Tell5