VORTEX
When Greenwich, London, was named Longitude 0°, it centred the heart of the British Empire within a system of standardised time.
The instituted temporal shift of Daylight Savings twice a year is a glitch in the system of colonial time that can be seized on as an opportunity to reclaim it.
Annually, BST becomes GMT after the autumn equinox; 02:00 becomes 01:00 for a second time in the twilight hours and a time vortex emerges.
ＶＯＲＴＥＸ assembled four Chinese diasporic ritualists, with differing degrees of proximity to British soil, citizenship and statehood, on October 30, 2022 – at a site that extended the Greenwich Meridian Line beyond its entrenched 0° engraving and into a public green. Traditional Chinese Medicine identifies the liver meridian line as most active at the corresponding body clock window in time. Entering the vortex, the ritualists performed movements connecting to our liver meridians, coordinated using Taoist sorcery to pluralise and queer standardised time.
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Kidneyᵛᵒʳᵗᵉˣ metastasized that act of temporal reclamation into the providence of the kidney meridian. In July 2023, this ritual took place at LungA Festival ~18:00 GMT, Longitude -14.008889° (Seyðisfjörður), constituting another ~day~glo bubble released by the ＶＯＲＴＥＸ intervention. Unfurling in the chilling, dark waters of a subpolar fjord, it tested the Will of its creatrix in the face of 11 of their deepest, most annihilating fears - while submerged in the wet unknown.
The 11 fear-charms worn, carried and held in(to) Fjarðará lake:
During LungA 2023, the original ＶＯＲＴＥＸ intervention was screening at Tækniminjasafn Austurlands (Technical Museum of East Iceland) as part of Tender Raptures: let them guide you - alongside works by Miles Greenburgh, Venus Jasper and Ra Tack.
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As part of Milan Art Week 2023, Triple Burnerᵛᵒʳᵗᵉˣ was performed alongside a premiere screening of ＶＯＲＴＥＸ at *•.¸𝐹𝒶𝑒𝓇𝒾𝑒 𝑅𝒶𝓂𝓅𝒶𝑔𝑒¸.•*. Curated by Yicong Song at Love Bar, Milan - the ritual was the first in a showcase of caring and healing performative acts from East & South East Asian artists based in London: alongside OT, Bones Tan Jones and CHIYU.
Taking place in April at 22:00 CEST in Longitude 9.18951° Milan, the Triple Burnerᵛᵒʳᵗᵉˣ was the first spiral that bloomed and glowed from a glitched documentation premiere of the original ＶＯＲＴＥＸ intervention, igniting and vaporising in crucibles of fire, spirit and water – and metabolising in the bodies of the creatrix and attendant ritualists altogether.
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