amy pickles is an artist, organiser and educator. She experiments with ways to hold onto, and consider, colonial infrastructures we are a part of by studying topographies, intentions and misuses of communication technologies. Studying is both form and content of her practice, which is articulated as curriculum, workshop, symposium or works that reconfigure and restage debris from collective learning. Debris is transmitted as experimental writing, sculpture, print, performance, radio and film. She is a member of Varia and co-organiser of Performance Lab.
Chantal - (2022) was performed by Max Franklin, Chloë Janssens, Anna Lugmeier and Marko Gutić Mizimakov. 2023.
Movie. Kodak Vision3 Color Negative Super8 film transferred to digital. 3mins 53secs.
Four people experiment with tools around a tree in which the name Chantal is inscribed. The call and materials are a re-imagining and re-assembling of Lygia Clark's relational object works, involving a group call, selfie sticks and a hood like costume that covered one of the participants heads.
Chantal
game for ‘creative freedom’ - (2022) was made with Toon Fibbe, Nada Gambier, Chloë Janssens, Anna Lugmeier, Marko Gutić Mizimakov, Nathaniel Moore and Martina Petrovic.
Documentation of collective experience. 1hr 30mins 13secs.
Film recorded on microscopic camera, transcribed conversation used as text for animation. Debris from the evening included blue margaritas. game for 'creative freedom', was an experimental mode of facilitating conversation, disguised within a game mechanic. The setting was the Cold War. The theme, how art and art workers were knowingly - and often unknowingly - mobilized for capitalist and colonialist gains. How was art used for promotion of these 'values'? How were cultural narratives warped to align with the idea of a highly developed and progressive global north, while other cultures were positioned as old and 'primitive'?
Notes after On Coloniality - (2022) was written with Chloë Janssens and Túlio Rosa.
Essay for reader, 'In these circumstances’. Editor, Philippine Hoegen.
Published by Onomatopee Projects and a.pass.
'On Coloniality’ was a temporary context for collective study. To learn, from creative practices and writing, about coloniality’s manifold dimensions.
Der Bien und der Garten - (2021) was made with Michaela Lakova and Bérénice Staiger, with Sophie Pauwels.
German with english subtitles.10mins 35secs.
Digital film in combination with Kodak Vision3 Colour Negative Super8 film transferred to digital, and scans of the book RUCHES 2400AEC - 1852EC, by Aladin Borioli.
The work is about a beehive in the garden of artist studios Mevrouw BOK. Beekeeper and artist Bérénice narrates the piece, discussiong her relationship with the bees and her surroundings.
First shown after sunset in the same garden. BUURTIJS, by Hera Hughes, served three flavours of ice cream flavoured with honey from the hive. Whisky sours were made with the leftover egg whites.
Colonial Infrastructures Worksessions - (2022 - 24) is made with Sofia Boschat-Thorez and Czarina Calinawagan. Ongoing series emerging out of Varia.
Our workshops intend to make tangible invisible colonial mechanisms of hierarchy and oppression that are prevalent in everyday communication technologies, yet often difficult to understand. We depart from knowledges and tools shared by invited guests, then learn about practices, and possibilities, of knowledge sharing that evade established colonial means, and allow for different ways of access and dissemination.
alternative echelons / installation - (2021) reconfigures the materials and tools of the ongoing project alternative echelons, for gallery setting. Here it is made out of; curved copper pipes, brass fastenings, crab shells, cuttings of 16mm film, (of 'alternative echelons' as film) detritus from the beach, hands free neck holder for your phone, an old android phone displaying a video of writing experiments on a collective writing document (an etherpad) that became the script for 'alternative echelons' as performance, and the digitised version of the 16mm work. Materials are debris from collective work, copper chosen for its role as a component layer in internet cables.
alternative echelons / film - (2020) was performed by Christina Karagianni, George Rallis, Merve Kiliçer, amy pickles. Sound, Max Franklin. Director of Photography, Ana Buljan.
16mm film transferred to digital. 11mins 19secs.
Ongoing research and performance series to challenge colonial infrastructures and reconsider our capture through surveillance technologies. Our action as research involved a workshop | performance | ritual | protest by the Google datacentre in Eemshaven, NL, and around the industrial complex. We were searching for a Dutch undersea internet cable, the COBRAcable, that emerges onto the land at this site. We searched through our phones, extensions of our bodies, and through 'the internet’ in a re-choreography of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña’s performance 'Cloud Net'. We are adorned with costumes made up of our phones and Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s relational objects. Our costumes are our interface for sensing the incomprehensible.
This work repeats the actions of an event in 2019, on the british sovereign land base of Dhekelia, in Cyprus. The military base is home to a listening station, which is part of Five Eyes - a network of surveillance made through an alliance between native english speaking countries. This infrastructure enacts colonial surveillance, it is an invisible, pervasive force perpetuating online discrimination and racial bias. We are trying to understand nationalistic perspectives in our education and upbringing. As performers we are british, greek, turkish and cypriot, all nationalities involved in the contested history of the island of Cyprus.
alternative echelons / film
author - (2019 - 20) is an online library and was a radio broadcast. The library contains resources and documentation from roughly one year of experiments in art education. Digital matter is classified as debris, it results from choreographed, collective working and is organised around it's relation to the writer (copied, stolen, found, gift, bought and repurposed) in effort to give attention to networks of learning. The work considers what a learning environment is. It grew from a failed project to make a physical studio space inside an art academy.
Designers and developers, Sofia Boschat-Thorez and Cristina Cochior. Editors, Kate Briggs and Isabelle Sully. Producer Kimmy Spreeuwenberg. Writer and organiser amy pickles. Sonic contributions from Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Martin Gugger and Arvand Pourabbasi. Made with support from CBK Rotterdam and Hybrid Publishing.
