hermione spriggs

The Crocodile's Pool is Empty (Hermione Spriggs and Kaya Uzel)

THE CROCODILE’S POOL IS EMPTY explores the participatory allurement of open signifiers, language-as-material, and the embodiment of power. The project draws from Kaya Uzel’s ethnographic work involving protest and revolution in Burkina Faso and more specifically the Burkinabe concept of “naam”, a form of political power that is gained through transgressive acts of consumption, and Hermione Spriggs’ sculptural work with animal traps which she describes as ‘diagrams with the world rubbed all over them’.

Our collaboration takes as its point of departure protests against the government of Blaise Compaore in 2014. Members of the public occupied the president’s family residence, dismantling the building and annotating its structure with incantations and protest graffiti. Text inside an emptied swimming pool reads “Le fleuve du crocodile est vide” – The crocodile’s pool is empty.

Two interacting kinetic sculptures occupy the street outside SPACE gallery. Originally invented by Peter Minshall for the Trinidadian Carnival, the ubiquitous ‘air dancer’ has since been appropriated as both an advertising lure and an effective bird-scarer. Here, two air dancers – clad in the green and red of Berkina Faso’s revolutionary flag – riff off the Berkinabe association of politicians to crocodiles, evoking the apparently endless cycle of revolutionary energy in Berkina, and the double ententre of the word ‘revolt’.

It survives and dies from it (R), It dies and survives from it (L). Media: fabric, electricity, wind, sound. Hermione Spriggs with Kaya Uzel 2019

Media: fabric, electricity, wind, sound, bucket, chair, spray paint. Hermione Spriggs with Kaya Uzel, 2019

Morphologies of Invisible Agents (link to website)

Artists: David Burrows, Lucy Cash, John Cussans, Melanie Jackson, Dean Kenning, Lucy A Sames, Hermione Spriggs. With performances by Aas and Plastique Fantastique.

Anthropologists: Narges Ansari, Igor Cherstich, Martin Holbraad, Kelly Fagan Robinson, Julia Sauma, Kaya Uzel.

Morphologies of Invisible Agents explores the relationship between the invisible and its tangible realisations in contexts of acute political change: from rampant capitalism, neoliberal reform and austerity to protest and revolution.

Through a diagrammatic foregrounding of the invisible agents at work in these contexts – spirits, forces, affects, ideologies – Morphologies of Invisible Agents confronts several questions concerning the qualities of a ‘social morphology’: might social transformations themselves have a diagrammatic quality? What is it that we see in the act of tracing moments and processes of social upheaval? What happens, for example, if we treat myths and rituals, ideologies and cosmologies, politics and governance as relational artefacts that diagram social relationships? How might these diagrammatic spectres be sensed and what happens when they become apparent? If social shifts are themselves diagrammatic, then might making a diagram be itself an avatar of and for social transformation?

The exhibition is the outcome of the Social Morphologies Research Unit’s (SMRU) long-term dialogue between artists and anthropologists, mediated by their shared use of diagrams as catalysts for thinking and doing social change. Collaborating pairs of artists and anthropologists use as their point of departure the shifting social tensions they detect in an array of settings: Shi’a rituals in Iran, revolutionary change in Libya and Cuba, the slashing of welfare in the UK, and more. Delving into the hidden dynamics of these social morphologies, the collaborating pairs present a series of speculative works that deploy diagrams and diagrammatics as not merely explanatory machines but as exploratory investigations to allow invisible agents to be sensed.

The Social Morphologies Research Unit is based in the Anthropology Department and the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London and is an offshoot of Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics (CARP).