 Ashcroft. Louise is working with performances, writing, video, sculpture, radio, and participatory experiences and describes her art as an attempt to disrupt social, bureaucratic, and economic systems which have power over us. Louise graduated from the Ruskin School of Art, Birkbeck, and studied sculpture at the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited widely, for instance, at BQ Berlin Latitude Festival or on BBC Radio. Louise is co-founder of the Free Art School, Alta FMA, and teaches art at Goldsmith College. Today, she introduces us to her work, or let's say, ways of speaking fiction to power. Let's give a warm welcome and applause to Louise Ashcroft. Hi. Is this working? So I'd like you all to find an object that you've got in your bag or in your pocket and then hold them up, whatever you've got. The most interesting thing, it doesn't have to be that interesting. I mean, I guess there won't be anything really unusual, and you might want to hide it if it is too unusual. And then I thought we could try to link them together to open source a narrative of some kind. What's that? Okay, we've got a photo of... A photo of... Is that you hugging a dog? Okay, a photo of someone hugging a dog. The last drop, the politics of water. How might those two things link together? So we've got the dog, there's a last drop. Would you give the dog the last drop of water before you drank it, if there was... Who comes first, you or the dog? There's some kind of... There's something about water. There's something about dogs. What else have we got? Is this... Is that a cigar or a pen or a lighter? It's a knife. It's a knife? Okay, we've got a knife. It's like this long. So will the dog be eaten if the... I mean, this is clearly an apocalyptic scenario. Who... Something's happening with the knife and there's only a bit of water left. What have we got here? Pills. Pills. Right, we've got some really good objects. I was just expecting like water bottles. Okay, so what's lacquer trays? What does it do? For drinking milk. Okay, for drinking milk. So you can drink milk if you have those, but you can't if you don't. I didn't even know they existed. So we've got the water and that. Maybe a chemical reaction might happen if we add something else. What's this here? Oh, some kind of... Right, a tea, but it's very acidic. There's kind of alchemical or chemistry. Maybe we're trying to make a new material. Are there earmuffs to help to drown out the sound of the barking from the dog as the experiment that whatever has been done to the dog with the chemicals and maybe the dog is going on some kind of a trip psychologically or physically, we don't know. Oh, an inhaler, right, okay, to calm things down, perhaps. And this is a reflector for when it... Is that a horse or a reflector for a horse? So there's now a horse and the dog. I think we just need two more things because otherwise it will be the whole talk. Listen, right, a hammer, and is that another hammer? What is this? Socket wrench. A socket wrench, okay. So can someone please do some of the work? It may be for testing the reflexes of the dog before it goes on its excursion. And this also for sockets, maybe just to tighten up some of its ligaments, we'll have one more... Oh, maybe this is kind of nice, isn't it? I'm glad that you've got that on you just in case. So perhaps this will be how it does fly up. It's got its passport there as well. We don't need to finish the story, but I just wanted to... You can do that yourselves afterwards, or you can do that in your heads, but I think it's quite nice that you could open source a story or a film. Maybe there's someone who can fund that film and we'll talk about it later. I quite like the idea of sort of hacking the audience. And when I use the word hacking, I use it wrongly in the superficial way that somebody who has really very little knowledge of technology might have like me. So I apologise if I kind of continually use this fairly superficial idea of hacking, which comes from a very non-specialised position of an artist who's very much involved in physical things. I did promise that I would bring a load of props today, but then I realised that I couldn't really get them in my luggage and I decided to bring pants instead of all the objects. And that's why I sourced them from you lot. And they were much more interesting objects than what I had. Usually I use quite a lot of props in my practice and I use them to kind of intervene in public space in different ways, most of which reveal the futility of the individual trying to confront big capitalism or state control. And often they fail to really change the world, but maybe just for a moment they change the psychological space of being in public space. So I describe the sort of tactic as anarcho comedy, I suppose, playing the world wrongly to create moments of confusion and that confusion can be resistance to power. So for example, this up at the top corner, I started collecting the surface of Mayfair, which is an area of London which is very rich and it's owned by Gerald Cavendish Groves, actually he's died now, but his son, the UK's most eligible bachelor apparently, this kind of aristocratic landowner owns Mayfair. And so I'm collecting the surface, all of the receipts and rubbish and dust and everything and posting it back to the landowner who lives in Chester in the north of England so that he'll receive all this detritus and kind of physicalize Mayfair, which to him is just an asset on an Excel spreadsheet. So thinking about how you might kind of directly connect an owner of land with the sort of grit of that place by literally posting it. I always think about who owns the land beneath your feet and in England that often is some aristocrats or some public school, which means private school, confusingly. So some kind of rich person and it hasn't really changed for a long time and even increasingly public space is being sold off to big companies and hedge funds and pension funds so it's actually getting worse. These vegetables here, there's an intervention that I do where I buy the most unusual looking vegetable that I can find from a local market and then I take it into a supermarket and I try to buy it along with the rest of my shopping and the cashier doesn't know what it is, often their colleague doesn't know what it is, the supervisor doesn't know what it is, the deputy manager and then the senior manager and in some cases I've been lucky enough to meet the main manager of the Marks and Spencer's food store but what I really wanted to do was to take that flow of the way things work in a quite mechanical way with the humans as part of that machine and to open up conversations and to give agency back to the people so that, well mainly the conversations were about the taxonomy of vegetables and whether it was a carrot or a marrow or whether they should put it through as a carrot or a marrow and I did spend quite a lot of money on it. I think I've donated a lot of money to Tesco's and Sainsbury's so this aesthetic and anaesthetic, it's just a switch that I carry around with me and when it's on anaesthetic, things are slightly duller and it is like a placebo really and when it's on aesthetic, things just brighten up a bit. A lot of these things are more for me like this trowel in the top corner, it sometimes if I feel like completely powerless I might dig a hole in the ground and put my head in it so that I can imagine wearing the entire earth as a giant head but other things have more of a tangible political impact like this is seeds that attract bats and because obviously the 1827 Wildlife and Countryside Act which prohibits building work to take place when there are bats present so if you attract bats to a building that's about to undergo renovation or become a luxury apartment which is pretty much every industrial building in London, bats are a really good way of resisting what artists do which is gentrify areas so I'm kind of cancelling myself out, I like to think with that. This was a mask that I used so I started building these belts which had extensions and I would go on the underground train and attempt to stop crowds from forming so I would keep this distance, the personal space boundary from myself, it was an anti-crowd belt but then it didn't really work, people just crushed it instantly and when I wore this mask instead people kept an average of about two metres away so that works a little bit better. At the top there there's some perfume quite stereotypically feminine perfume that I carry around and I spray on all the statues in London so if you do go to London and smell some of the stonework of the statue you'll find that the sort of patriarchal macho quality of the statues is slightly reduced by the feminine scent that is radiating so really it doesn't do much but it just creates moments of highlighting the structures that are there already and play full ways. I think this is a bouquet that I regularly make bouquets of flowers from hotels and banks and corporate flower displays so kind of taking maybe graves as well, not always graves and make these corporate bouquets that's a Santander red from outside the one in Liverpool Street and I like pointing, this photography glove is actually just to remind me that pointing is really the new photography or the new old photography and really all my work is just pointing I don't really like to do it but you can create quite a lot of tension by pointing at someone now or in public space and three year olds do that all the time but we forget that pointing is really powerful and I would sometimes do this walk where I would start in Greenwich in London and I would walk into the docklands where all the big bank buildings are the tallest building in Canary Wharf, one Canada Square it wants to be looked at, it deliberately tries to stand out but I'd walk pointing towards it for a mile or two and then it would always be in my line of sight and it would always be commanding the attention of the skyline and as I got right up to the building the security guard would inevitably cover my finger and I realised it wanted to be looked at from afar but as soon as you looked at it on the ground that was a terrorist threat so I've done lots of pointing at buildings and seeing how long it takes before I'm stopped I find that when you say that you're an artist you can get away with a lot more because you start explaining the concept to the security guard and they really have very little experience in dealing with a philosophical question that you might ask them there isn't really a protocol for that and so I start to have interesting conversations with security guards as well and they start to have that creative moment in their day I guess and I think being knowingly naive is a really good strategy for sort of hacking reality because the idea is very powerful I mean, gestures for like hundreds of years gestures have been used to... even commissioned by kings and queens to question authority, even their own authority so almost like the gesture is a vent for power and I tell the stories of these things at gigs and comedy or art or performance nights and I didn't really want to record me actually doing these things because it felt like then it's just videos of people looking at me doing something weird it kind of co-opts it really easily whereas when you use it as a rumour it becomes more of a recipe for something that anyone else could do like this lady is definitely thinking of doing it herself and I do need all the help I can get so if you could all start doing some of these gestures and find your own as well, that would be great and that's me again telling some people about something so other gestures that I've done my friend was having an exhibition in her house so I took some of the carpet from her front room and started to occupy little parts of space this is on the street where the Bank of England is Threadneedle Street and so this is I think another bank building so there are little, there are sort of legal necessities for so yeah there needs to be a gap between two buildings because of some kind of planning thing and so these little in-between spaces become places where people smoke or where homeless people might shelter or where I might kind of occupy with the carpet from my friend's house I quite like the fact that there are these off-cuts which they are magnets for like marginalised activity so I wanted to really like highlight that again and to kind of claim the bits of space that are really some of the only bits of space that are left in London because everything is so corporate and this is a gesture that I did where I've been collecting land from all over London particularly in these former public spaces that are now privatised and posting them back to their international land owners who have probably never been there but who own parts of Kings Cross or yeah this Qatari sovereign wealth fund it costs quite a lot of money to be honest and I haven't been able to do all of them but you know it's for the cause and the fact that they might just get part of this land like I want to reveal the absurdity that's inherent in advanced capitalism because sometimes like my mum might say oh well you don't want to be too extreme you know you've got to live in the real world you know this is reality the fact that Jeff Bezos owns like more than a bunch of countries this is just the real world but actually when we think about it in a comedic way it becomes an in a literal way it is actually a ridiculous idea that one person might own so much I did a residency at Tate Modern and Tate Ritten the big public galleries and they are trying to get more children from the schools around the local area who often they haven't been to galleries before to come and visit and so I was one of a few artists in residence who were working with the school's visits for a year and I would write to the Prime Minister with them this is a former Prime Minister and we would take the newspaper of the day and we would cut it all up and make nonsense stories with it and then send it to the Prime Minister and they came up with some really dark stuff but this is a very posh girls' school actually we had a variety of different types of schools I really like that they signed it with like Ruby and Lottie and Phoebe and Amani and Muddy and Daisy and all names that end in E and so I asked them, I said do you think that confusion could be political and they were like oh we feel confused by the gallery or we don't really like it or we feel like we don't understand it it makes us feel stupid and by the end we talked more about confusion and their unease with confusion around art and they decided that actually every group really decided that confusion did have this really powerful kind of resistance inherent in it because if you send the Prime Minister that they don't think oh they want us to spend a bit more on education they have to think what does this mean and like that is not a passive position that's a very active position when you have to take responsibility for your own interpretation of something so I think ambiguity and confusion and chaos maybe that's where that sort of anarchic quality that hacking can have relates to what I do and vice versa and I made these pocket squares you can't really see but I was doing a project in Croydon in South London and there was the youth court where all of the naughty young people go to have their trials and they'd scratch their names in the door at the back bit where they go out to smoke and so I photographed that and I thought I really liked it because it was a naughty little playful moment of resistance where they even at the court they'd scroll their names in and so I sent it to the new council reps who they just had a new team employed because the records of youth care was so bad in the borough that they'd had to sack everyone and get some new people in and they're paying them an absolute fortune and I thought to go with their luxury Savile Row suits they might need an edgy pocket square featuring this design of the graffiti to just kind of remind them I guess of the physicality of what it means to be a disenfranchised youth in that area this is a piece that I did where I took Investopedia and the Urban Dictionary and found words that were similar in both or the words that were the same in both but I just put the definitions together often I use collage so this is a kind of collage conceptually taking two things and putting them together and seeing what happens when you read one through another and I'm not really sure what happens apart from that it reveals that specialist language is alienating and if we removed specialist language from a lot of things then it would be way more accessible so I really wanted to reveal the humour in that as well as that like we can see that slang is humorous and sort of playful but also this becomes nonsense and I wanted to use them to I wanted to take the power away from the investment language by showing it as equal to this sort of colloquial language querying, querying, confusing we talked a bit about that but these are the sort of deep dives into particular spaces that I've been doing particularly spaces of commerce so I did a project in a shopping centre unofficially but I spent a few months in residence in a Westfield shopping centre in London and I led these retail therapy walks so people could come and I advertised it online and strangers came and I'd do these walks where we would reclaim them all as almost like a studio for creative practice that involved writing stories dressing up in costumes imagining what people would have been like that lived there hundreds of years ago when it was an agricultural area we made a grime track with a local wrapper but the space where he used to wrap was no longer there because a lot of the community spaces and the recording studios and things that were there before the mall came had sort of pushed people further out we wrote to CEOs of... we wrote nonsense letters to CEOs of some of the shops there was a tattoo on the leg of this model in this photo it says trust no one on the tattoo I noticed things that I wouldn't have noticed that were kind of ominous about the marketing apocalyptic advertising like this woman with the tattoo she's on the TK Max and she's got just cracked earth like a desert of cracked earth behind her as a kind of stylish backdrop and the more that I looked into the space of the shopping centre the more that I realised there was this kind of apocalypse chic and the t-shirts were a source of great inspiration I'll tell you a bit more about that in a second but I made a mall game a kind of... it's not really like Monopoly but it sounded nice and I could use the logo perfectly by chopping it up to make this new logo at the Westfield shopping centre logo and it handed out these games that were instructions of how to use them all in a different way to people in the mall so I've got loads of copies if anyone wants one just contact me and send me a stamp to just Envelope because my bedroom's got quite a lot of them it's getting really annoying like I've handed a lot out but... so I suppose I wanted to... because in accelerationism the idea of overthrowing big capitalism by taking it to its extreme like get loads of credit cards, max them out, buy everything do what it wants you to do but in an extreme way so it implodes sort of a bit like that like if you love the products in the shopping centre and you use them and you play with them and you get excited by them but you don't take them out of the shop then you do everything that it wants you to do but you don't kind of do the final thing which is give profit to shareholders and so I'm interested in the rules and then using the rules to like mess with the aims of those rules loopholes and rules and gaps in rules that's kind of what I'm trying to do and during my residency I noticed that there were loads of t-shirts with like phrases on them and then next to the shopping centre there was a boating community along the River Lee which is in the Olympic village in Stratford in East London so I realised that there were connections between the slogans on the t-shirts and the slogans on the boats so that one and then this skate plan Liquid Lynch, I'll be there in a Prosecco there were loads about Prosecco to be honest they're mainly about Prosecco and feminism but like they were all made by H&M and yeah like made in sweatshops so yeah this and grow like you couldn't even one side of made that connection there were boat names that you'd never have thought of there was one called Me, just Emmy and there were lots of t-shirts about sort of self-censoredness and it was like I couldn't I think once you make a connection things just sort of appear and I did a workshop with some with like local people where we painted slogans from the shopping centre but in this traditional boat style really as a way of slowing down the fast fashion rhythm and like focusing on what it might mean to be totally over it and what happens if you play one idea through another idea or one voice through another voice change the accent of the shopping centre to the accent of the boating community and then I did some big ones because if you have a gallery exhibition you have to do some big ones and put them on the wall and then more upper-leaf things were shown on these and then there were some t-shirts and there were also some videos of my field work in the shopping centre and the speakers have the grime rap track which I made with a local rapper we took the Argos catalogue which is a shopping catalogue and we took words out of it recombined them into a kind of poetry and then he rapped I'm not going to do I don't, it always feels inappropriate he won't come, he's much cooler he's got better things to do this is, I don't think I really need to show any of, or just kind of for a second she's got that don't judge me by my t-shirt off her chest he's just checking regulated wildness you chase your dinner around the plate to trigger primordial pleasure points keep chasing, wear wolves, fierceness yearning for your inner animal but he's gone to habitat the great indoors wild quotations that don't stand up anymore disorientated conglomerate landscapes kicked over by unicorn hoof shadows but you're in 24-7-3-6-5 luminosity the lights don't even go out here you're applying photo filters at transplant nocturnal sources where your aging eyes were cuteness epidemic post corporeal interspecies offspring screen size so more can fit in the arc when the waters rise but the closer you get the further the arc appears farther and farther pigeons are rainbow coloured if you look up close let's get out of here then somewhere, anywhere only aliens believe in us now they say the first stage is denial immortal skins on skeletons Elizabeth the first kept a unicorn horn in her cabinet a fake, probably a narwhal tusk there was a big market for them then serious explorers scoured the globe hunting for mythical beasts gotta catch em all divide all the matter in the world up into unicorn shaped chunks the second phase is acceptance swap the fantasy for firearms capitalist massacism we are warriors, rebels uncapturable, free with a giant barcode on the arm and the brand name supply and demand brands brazenly quoting the economic strategies that they've used to reify your life hours so I'll leave it just a little bit you can watch more on my website or on my YouTube if you want but this kind of selling of rebellion and selling of like the outsider I think it was quite interesting because the unicorn as a sort of I guess a kind of like queer symbol or like a kind of outsider symbol that's co-opted and there was unicorns it was a proper epidemic of unicorns in that shopping centre the whole time I was there I mean I love she's got that don't judge me by my I love unicorns and everything but I just got I've kind of over them now I've seen so many and so I also took deep dives into other spaces so I made some radio programmes where I analyse and over analyse call centre culture and AI as well there's a bit in there you can actually access them here it's not just in the UK it plays here as well and the Argos catalogue which is a shopping catalogue kind of rereading it through the lens of the whole earth catalogue which is a sort of 60s counter culture people say that it's a precursor to the internet and the call centre I was reading that through was it religious paintings of purgatory so like kind of yeah making spurious comparisons between things and I'll have to hurry up so I then did a residency in the house clearance section of a market in South London which just sells all of the stuff it just takes stuff from dead people's houses and then sells it without filtering at all I like this because I thought it tells you a lot about capitalism there's Bob's like his whole puncture was worth a lot it was priceless when it was his and he was in the office and no one could touch it and now that Bob's dead it's in the house clearance section of debt for market and it's not really worth anything like maybe 50p at Peter's stall by the Albany but then when we discover that it's Bob Marley's then its price goes up exponentially and so all the time the prices of these things were shifting according to like what someone needed or who happened to be passing or if it was raining they would all get rained on and then the umbrellas would go up in price I have to be faster but so lots of times I'm talking through these objects that I've just found kind of almost a moment before and trying to kind of analyse them and also using them as ways of shedding my own subjectivity and kind of becoming someone else like opening up there's something really nice about going through the house clearance section because you really you really kind of can shapeshift there's people's family photos and there's like there's funeral pamphlets and that it feels really inappropriate in terms of like identity and in the way that maybe ownership of identity becomes particularly relevant in the digital age like in depth of market there is no ethical rule it is literally anything from those houses is there and it and it becomes anyone's one of my students had a like a pot of scabs like from like bodily scabs that they just they bought at the market so I recommend it it's better than the shopping centre I need to kind of stop in a second but there is a video that you can see on my on my website of me kind of going through the shopping centre and there's a some fish I'm gonna not show you that he's just saying some fish change sex so you could maybe investigate that another time really quickly just to say that I've been doing these one hour holidays which are a group of people go on a kind of fictional holiday together over the course of an hour trying to find ways of creating moments of togetherness where of sort of fictional social scenarios can be enacted and the same with this piece which involved it was a development of a project where I go to strangers' houses and do the cleaning with them and we plan how we would spend the rest of our lives together during that hour of cleaning and this was a version of it which was playable by two strangers and they sorted socks while they planned how they'd spend the rest of their lives together using this questionnaire to make it a bit less awkward because when you're cleaning it isn't awkward when you're cleaning in their houses because there's something to do and they've invited you there and you don't know who they are and it's probably quite dangerous in an art centre where there was a theatre prop room and so after they'd filled in the questionnaires together I would get props that related to their fictional or speculative futures I think I need to kind of stop there but there's lots of other things that I mean it's just a sea monster committee that I'll finish by really quickly talking about this and so fanatourism is like a thing where dark tourism where people want to go to places where bad stuff has happened or scary stuff so the Loch Ness Monster makes millions of pounds for Scotland and in Hastings where this project was commissioned it's quite a rundown town and it has an art festival and they commissioned me to do something and I thought well we need to attract a sea monster to Hastings because it's by the sea and there are so many committees trying to regenerate Hastings so the first thing to do would be to do a public survey to find out what sea monster they all wanted like a focus group so this is a sea monster committee where they felt inside of the pillowcase of objects and that was a way of mining their unconscious for what sea monsters they might be able to feel and then we wrote them down and then we did a little we finished by doing a kind of ceremony where I talked where I kind of chanted the descriptions of the sea monsters with some of my friends who were playing instruments and we were on top of a toilet block overlooking the sea and we didn't we're not sure if we attracted one but we think it's kind of still on its way so yeah that's me there's a lot to say but you can see on my website it's a kind of hacking practice but I really don't know how to use a computer so if anyone wants to collaborate with me then just contact me thanks a lot please we do have time for two questions maybe so if you have one please go to the mics one two three here in the room mic number one please hello I'm personally also working with like hacking public spaces and I was interested in like when you're in these situations like how you interact with the people do you wear like that do you keep being in that artistic role or do you like reveal yourself as an artist and like how do you engage with the people if they talk to you if they explain yourself or something like that yeah like most of the time I don't appear to be an artist and even I question the usefulness of that term because it could it could be so many other things but it's I guess when people do ask what I'm doing I sometimes say I'm an artist because I think it's ambiguous enough and non-threatening enough for people to let you in there's a sort of respect for artists but also I think people who are not from an art background don't feel like an artist is superior to them they think more like they're a kind of unusual, slightly mad character and there's something really generous about the way that people treat an artist doing something unusual and they don't close down they kind of it is an invitation to play I think so I do try to talk to people but I don't really say I'm an artist unless it becomes necessary to do that I'd rather let them be quite uncertain as to what it is like on the train for example people didn't know what it was really and it was quite tense because it's quite a poor area and there was people in the morning drinking cans of beer and saying they didn't want me to them people thought I was like begging for money or a charity or they really didn't know what it was and so the question mark as to what my motives were was a little bit it felt a bit dangerous or weird or antagonistic in that situation but generally it it seems like being an artist kind of opens up more and allows for a kind of outsiderish position that people warm to mostly unless you're kind of being a dick head and sort of like authoritarian about that I think being the sort of artist widow is a really great or being the idiot I think being an artist and being an idiot can be a really nice combo so yeah if we run out of time so please very short question okay well I just met you and I love your work yeah that's a good wrap up for today so let's thank again for a wonderful talk well if anyone wants to do something just I really want I think it's quite isolate I feel quite isolated as an artist I think tech culture has way more collaborative stuff going on and I think like the art world really needs that and it absolutely doesn't have that much in London so just get in touch and even just to share ideas and bounce them around so yeah thank you very much thanks again Louise Ashbrook