Abi Palmer’s ‘Intrusion Manifesto’ explores the idea that chronically ill and disabled communities, in particular, experience ‘intrusions’ – frequent and unavoidable disruptions to daily life – that have an often overlooked impact on our creative practices. She believes that by acknowledging and centring these intrusions, we can use them to develop more innovative and sustainable ways of creating work.
Join Abi for a performance and workshop exploring ways to identify your own intrusions and use them as a jumping off point in your own practice.
Experiment with developing intrusion-centred work of your own.
The workshop will begin with a live performance from Abi’s book Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020), scored with haunting, dreamlike film. The performance explores themes of mysticism, chronic pain, queerness, and what it means to float.
Bio:
Abi Palmer is an artist and writer exploring the relationship between linguistic and physical communication. Crip Casino – her interactive gambling arcade parodying the wellness industry and institutionalised spaces – has been exhibited at Tate Modern, Somerset House and Wellcome Collection. Her debut book Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020) is a fragmented memoir, jumping between luxury thermal pool, and blue inflatable bathtub.
About Sanatorium:
A young woman spends a month taking the waters at a thermal water-based rehabilitation facility in Budapest. On her return to London, she attempts to continue her recovery using an £80 inflatable blue bathtub. The tub becomes a metaphor for the intrusion of disability; a trip hazard in the middle of an unsuitable room, slowly deflating and in constant danger of falling apart. Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020) moves through contrasting space--bathtub to thermal pool, land to water, day to night--interlacing memoir, poetry and meditations on the body to create a mesmerising, mercurial debut.
Palmer's accompanying film blends haunted dresses and immersive mycological meditations with analogue footage of Palmer in the bathtub (directed and shot by Anna Ulrikke Andersen) and diaristic fragments from the Sanatorium itself. Themes of chronic pain, queerness and mysticism emerge. Lose yourself in the blurred lines between pain and healing, land and water, sinking — and what it means to float.