Anna Walker Artists Talk at SVA

I’ll be hosting an artists talk by Anna Walker at Stroud Valley Arts this Friday (September 20th). Anna is an artist, writer and researcher working in multi-media. She has been exploring trauma in her art’s practice for many years, researching how the body responds to overwhelming traumatic and stressful situations and how it reorganises itself to cope with or manage it. The experience of trauma creates a tension in the body that ruptures the functioning of ‘normal’ memory schemas, whether in an attempt to forget or an effort to manage the memory.

Through video, text and sound, Anna investigates the interaction between states of knowing and not knowing, acknowledging and the refusal to acknowledge, and the endeavour to illuminate the relationships between previously unrelated events, structures, perceptions and actions, and to explore cultural trauma, social responsibility and political action.

The talk will take place at SVA, 4 John Street, Stroud between 5.30 and 7.30 pm. £5 on the door.

The Occult Conspiracy of the Unconscious: Discussion with Jasun Horsley

I recently had a most enjoyable conversation with Jasun Horsley, author of Seen and Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist and Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse, on his podcast The Liminalist.

In part one we discuss our travels in Mexico, the Narco-Satanicos cult, tabloid press, sensationalism, The Believers, Maximón, Ah Pook, Baron Samedi, Jesus Malverde, Nagualism, Seen and Not Seen, I Spit on Your Grave, video nasties, sexual repression, Georges Bataille, trauma, transgression, psychoanalysis, false screen memories, deviant cultural imprints and mothers.

In part two we discuss secrecy, shame, Philip K. Dick, uncanny zones of literary encounter, Jonathan Lethem, Erik Davis, sleepers in the matrix, Undead Uprising, academic politics, Foucault, Bataille, Neo-Gnostic conspiracy, Anti-Christian Marxism, accelerated coincidence, affinity, George Hodel, The Black Dahlia, Man Ray, Surrealist S&M, crime, Fred Vermorel’s Dead Fashion Girl, Frankfurt School, Cultural Marxism, Room 237, Fabian Society, Walter Benjamin and cannabis.