For k-punk presents the 2023 Mark Fisher Memorial Event. Commissioned by the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University.
This January, For k-punk will be celebrating Mark Fisher’s final book, The Weird and the Eerie. These two terms were, for Fisher, two kinds of aesthetic experience. Common to tales of horror and the supernatural, he argues that the things we recognise as weird and eerie are not always aberrations to be expelled but rather problems to be solved.
An encounter with the weird might well signify the emergence of the new, for instance, whereas the eerie is encountered in those moments where our expectations are confounded and the givens we hold dear evaporate before our eyes.
Though aesthetic in its orientation, the implicit political message of Fisher’s final published works seems to be that this world of ours is unstable and our fictions consistently explore its many contingencies, opening portals to worlds quite different from our own. Five years on from the book’s publication, living in a world that is only getting weirder, we wonder where we are now.
Moving from the lecture theatre to the event space, this year’s event has a programme full of screenings, live performance, music and discussions. Curated by Natasha Eves, together with James Sibley, Zara Truss Giles, Olga Paczka and Matt Colquhoun.
We want to say thank you to the Fox & Firkin for generously hosting this year’s event. The Fox and Firkin is wheelchair accessible and on ground floor level, with an accessible bathroom. The garden is at ground floor level, but with some uneven flooring.
Poster designed by Natasha Eves.
Artists
W.H.Y. / Zara Truss-Giles
Robin Mackay
Incursions
Paul Rooney
Nat Sharp
Liza Dickson
DJ Gonz
Kitty
Listen
Watch
Walk
There is nothing where there should be something; there is something where there should be nothing.
Incursions is a collaborative walking project based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, facilitated by Archie Smith and Kitty McKay. Through practices of psycho/socio-geography, collective research, mapping, archiving and friendship, we work to shift dominant neoliberal narratives of space and place, co-authoring ‘counter-narratives’ for how we inhabit civic worlds and build active solidarities. These counter-narratives sometimes manifest as moving-image, sound, radio, archives, research or social engagement.
Incursions’ name came from On Vanishing Land, when Justin Barton describes the eerie as “an incursion of the unknown into a silence, an emptiness, a gap”. We were exploring the post industrial wastelands along the river Tyne in late 2019 through walking, trying to locate what we thought was missing amid old shipyards and Roman forts.
Alongside screening ‘Three Walks’, a film produced in collaboration with filmmaker Sarah Jenkins, commissioned by The National Trust which explores the vanished mining village of Marsden in South Tyneside, Kitty from Incursions will conduct a group walk, from Goldsmiths to The Fox and Firkin, in search of the River Quaggy. The Quaggy is one of London’s ‘lost rivers’; it flows in concrete encasements underground and through South East London’s quieter suburbs. It is the most engineered of London’s rivers with measures in place to control and contort its path, but still, like a trickster, its banks overflow and it persists to make its presence known. Here, the eerie is at play prevailing against the capital’s interference.
Beginning at Mark’s mural on Warmington Tower, which, together with friends, we painted in the wee hours one cold January 6 years ago, we will walk to Deptford Creek, where the River Ravensbourne meets the Thames. Using the Ravensbourne as a guide, we will meander to Lewisham where it slips under the concrete, dodging the skyscraping developments that have spawned since our departure only 3 or 4 years ago. More eerie entities, immense nothingness in luxury glass, a CGI perfect locale, haunt our old stomping ground at Lewisham. Resistance perhaps can be offered here by looking down, not up, to find where the Quaggy meets the Ravensbourne, where its journey of disruption begins.
This walk is a mere opportunity to spend a few hours together, paying closer attention to surroundings that are seemingly always in motion, to locate eeriness latent in the landscape that can maybe provide a different route through the capitalist city.
For Mark Fisher
for k-punk 