FUTURERITUAL: Exploring Ritual In Queer Performance Cultures | ICA London

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"Contemporary culture is characterised by states of anxiety, alienation and exile. Breaking with these states requires a series of temporal maneuvers. Ritual is an apt symbolic technology for this work, for ritual is a way of entering time and rendering it habitable through communion."

~ Joseph Morgan Schofield

Mythic Time, 2021

Joseph Morgan Schofield, VestAndPage

Residential Workshop

Image courtesy of the artist via: https://futureritual.co.uk/archive/arnolfini-2018

Joseph Morgan Schofield is a performance artist who created, and whose work was featured collaboratively as part of, the FUTURERITUAL research project.

Joseph’s practice explores the place of ritual in contemporary art culture, as well as provide liminal spaces through workshops and performances in which we can inhabit our most authentic and personal selves. They use art and ritual as a medium through which to remake ourselves and our world, often utilising moving image and expanded forms of writing.

With bare feet I touch the sky I yearn, 2022

Joseph Morgan Schofield

Performance Piece

Image courtesy of the artist via: https://josephmorganschofield.com/with-bare-feet-touching-the-sky-I-yearn

FUTURERITUAL considers the use of ritual in contemporary performance and queer cultures. The contributing artists represent an array of responses to questions surrounding the utilisation of ritual practices in the manifestation of queer futurities, and states of belonging (especially in, or in between, difference). This is represented through the investigation of memory, collaboration, ecology, alienation, intimacy, and belonging through the lens of the body (and its autonomy) and identity.

These teeming forms, 2021

Joseph Morgan Schofield

Video, 28 mins 33 secs

Image courtesy of the artist via: https://josephmorganschofield.com/these-teeming-forms

This manifests itself in Joseph’s work through their use of performance to the ecologies of queerness and ritual to give autonomy to non-binary bodies. People who fall somewhere other than cisgender on the gender spectrum, or don’t fall on it at all, often incur trauma simply by living in a world that wasn’t made to them or to welcome them; this is often painful and daunting to heal but is made easier when spaces of unapologetic queerness and safety in that community are opened up. This is something that I want to explore in my work in some way. I would like to focus on sharing and learning with other queer people to build spaces where that is possible amongst the mundane- to begin appreciating all the things that I take for granted that can be seen as ritualistic and so harnessed.

‘These teeming forms’ is a communion with the land. Joseph works from the belief that land, and body, are archives. This video explores new mythic relations with the land and their connections to queer ecology, and the porosity of eroticism and grief. It is important to both mine and Joseph’s work that the healing that takes place within these spaces be allowed to happen organically.