We sat down for a quick chat with zack mennell about their upcoming project. Common Host, described as a weekend gathering situating ancient folk customs such as mumming in new relation to the post-industrial landscapes of London, Kent and Essex. 13 – 15 March, Peckham (London) Safehouse 1& 2, Copeland Road, Peckham tickets: https://futureritual.co.uk/zack-mennell-common-host-(202526)
COMMON HOST draws on mumming, folklore and psychogeography—what feels urgent about reviving these pre-modern forms within a post-industrial, post-capitalist landscape?
I am drawn to folk practices and psychogeography as a move away from individualism and toward connection – be it with place, people, community, or materials. A key feature of these post-industrial landscapes is how they are felt and experienced as alienating places. As these structures are designed and placed to be alienated from the people and systems they serve, in the case of Thurrock, where a sea change was filmed, this is London. Psychogeography offers a way to map our understanding to some degree and to redefine these sticky, hierarchical relations. My practice follows intuition and compulsion, often stepping toward the uncanny and abandoned. An aspect of working with pre-modern traditions that have persisted is to consider inhuman scales of time and to frame that question for our future, in a world of climate breakdown: what will be left of us, and the traces of our unceasing ingress into the environment. To begin to understand this, I’ve looked at what has survived from the pre-Christian world, megaliths and (now) mutated folk traditions. This work posits a version of this in which industrialised factory workers may become mythic creatures, and concrete and steel megastructures become the standing stones of the future.
COMMON HOST entangles ecology, disability rights and anti-psychiatry—how do these frameworks intersect in the bodies and behaviours of your mutant figures?
The entanglement is foundational to the conception of these beings. (para)site came from a desire to re-dress my relationship with my DWP and NHS archive of letters by using them as material. Through experiences of being a “product” of the psychiatric and welfare system, I have taken these documents, cut them up and reorganised them into collages, dissolved them in the Thames, and recorded and re-recorded phrases onto cassette tapes until the words disappear. This stemmed from witnessing myself and others engaged with the welfare state being repeatedly portrayed in the press as “parasites” on society, so I wanted to take on that mantle and inhabit it; that’s part of where the diaper being came from. The nappy being speaks to a medicalisation of my body, communicating obtusely about my compromised bladder, this organ that has been “maladapted” since I was born. Still, it also speaks to desire, to fetish, and to the fluid boundaries of the ecological disaster taking place in our waterways. I feel the weight of the diapers absorbing the environment. Walking into the Thames in the diaper suit, I feel my skin invaded by the water, swelling the material that swaddles my body, its microscopic aberrations & pollutants seeking a way into my flesh.
Your work moves between performing “as yourself” and as cryptid, other-than-human beings; what does that shifting of identity allow you to say that a singular voice cannot?
This covering of my recognisable self is a way of mediating the relation to a public and to people. I don’t feel like I am performing away from myself or not as myself, inside the diapers, inside the grass, or masks, I am always me, maybe a very particular version of me. This performance work isn’t led by character or a fiction, but is based on deep research on varied topics, old traditional practices, and personal histories. The distinguishing of these beings is to allow something else to come to the fore, such as questions about who the parasite is and what the hierarchical dynamic is between me, encased and anonymised in these suits, while revealing intensely private information from documents that talk about me but not to me. I suppose part of it is seeking out the multitudes of, sometimes opposing, voices within myself and giving facets of them a focus through each guise of these creatures.
How do the semi-derelict domestic spaces of Safehouse reshape the audience’s role—as witnesses, guests, or intruders—within the performances?
Performing in public has a really beautiful, electric relationship with accidental audiences, where people unexpectedly come across a work. The Safehouses serve as a gesture towards this spirit, whilst offering a layered aesthetic that speaks to material histories and to the curatorial theme of what is left behind to survive through time beyond human presence. You touch on it really beautifully by saying “guests or intruders” in the uncanny domestic setting, while witnessing strange actions; it aims to play with the relation between a work (or artist) and its audience. Part of the power of live art, to me, is the breakdown of rigid boundaries between audience and performer, where an intermingling or entangling of zones occurs so that one can connect more to the liveness of the work, while also simultaneously reading the audience through the performance.
You describe scavenging industrial relics as part of your process; how does working with material detritus change the ethics or politics of performance-making?
I have always been drawn to site-specific and responsive work, so finding material in the location is a key aspect of making with the place as a collaborator. Working sustainably has encouraged me to forage for materials such as litter from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries found across the Thames Foreshores, as well as biodegradable materials. The resourcefulness of scavenging and conversing with a place has fostered a new connection and relation with the world. It aligns with an ethics of relating to nature along the lines of “leave no trace” and seeks to mitigate the generation of ecologically impactful materials used in artmaking. As an artist entering professional practice in the context of climate breakdown, I find it an urgent issue I cannot ignore.
In staging a performance marathon alongside shorter, timed works, what are you asking of endurance, both from yourself and from audiences, in relation to survival and care?
In actuality, it’s more of a relay, but a performance marathon sounds more pleasing. Something I love about durational work is the experience of taking in a work over an expanse of time, really feeling and attending to the work and time unfolding in a way that rarely happens in daily life. This marathon is a chance to have a series of shorter works by different artists that bleed into one another, in their plurality and divergence, and address common themes by being hosted and witnessed as one larger work. It’s a programme of offering, suggesting an alternative to Sunday worship, and a moment to hold space together. The audience is free to come and go throughout, invited to mingle amongst the performances and the exhibited works.