A new live essay composed from video, text, and voice, T-1 assembles an intertwined montage from three discrete histories: ice, compromised vision, and colonial geography. The first presentation of Evan Calder Williams’ 2015 ISSUE Project Room residency, T-1 takes its name from an enormous roving Arctic island initially classified as “Top Secret” by the US Air Force. Incorporating video shot in both a modernist dollhouse and a melting spring forest, the performance moves widely among sites and texts, ranging from Anna Kavan’s slipstream novels to the nineteenth-century Caribbean and from fascist glacial cosmology to ghost ships allegedly crewed by cannibal rats. In this work, Williams continues to explore the blurry ground separating the speculative and the historical, seeking a visual and sonic language adequate to film and to speak what remains stuck in the middle.
Evan Calder Williams works across media on histories of capitalism, landscape, empire, and horror. He has presented films, performance, and audio at the Serpentine Gallery (2014); Images Festival (2014); the Montreal International Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (2014); ISSUE Project Room (2013); Tramway (2012); and the Whitney Biennial (2012). He is the author of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse and Roman Letters, as well as two books forthcoming in 2015, Shard Cinema and Donkey Time. He received a PhD in Literature from University of California Santa Cruz and was a Fulbright Fellow for his research on cinema, industry, and revolt. He is part of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine and one of the founders, with Lucy Raven and Vic Brooks, of research and production collective Thirteen Black Cats. He is a 2015 artist-in-residence at ISSUE Project Room.
