Knot Project Space produced and presented an exhibition by Ottawa/Edinburgh based group, The Confraternity of Neoflagellants, along with a series of related programs engaging their speculative, ‘neomedievalist’ practice. Their jam-packed þan-þan exhibition represented the first gesture in a series of Fall/Winter 2019 programs at Knot Project Space that looked at relationships between voice, fiction, collectivity and publication.
Over the course of three weeks of tangential, fiction-based, material and media-driven working in the space, the materials, the world of þan-þan began to unfold within the black box of Knot Project Space as an ever-proliferating, shifting labyrinth of videos, sounds, texts and objects – reactive ingredients that heated, bubbled and boiled-over in the cooking-up of World™. The Confraternity of Neoflagellant’s forthcoming book of the same name was taken up in this instance as a recipe book of sorts, providing a common space of linguistic and conceptual play that ultimately constructed and housed unprecedented culinary events, amplified a poly-vocal diffusion of mutter-matter, enabled improvised crock-pottery solutionising and scoby-fissioning, and turned its ears towards the nascent pan-dimensional cross-talkers of the book’s infectious imaginary. Over the course of its duration, the site of the exhibition behaved as both dwelling and workstation, continuously inviting further digestion from artists and public alike, generating a ballooning corpus that oozed its persuasive premodern fictions into every corner of that perpetual night. Through this collaborative and deeply gut-driven exhibition-making act, the book’s contents were not only rendered spatial and inhabited by artists and audiences alive, but its poetics and systems became transformed into an active and operative lens – one through which to © beyond its paginations of containment, and reveal instead a bleeding, vertiginous edge.
In relation to this exhibition, Knot Project Space presented a micro-library on site featuring a selection of publications from Punctum Books, who will be publishing The Confraternity of Neoflagellants forthcoming book þan-þan, and who published previously their 2013 saga thN Lng folk 2go: Investigating Future Premoderns.
The Confraternity of Neoflagellants
The Confraternity of Neoflagellants was founded in 2009 by Serjeant-At-Law Norman Hogg and joined by Keeper of the Wardrobe Neil Mulholland. The 12th Animal, Neven Lochhead, was summoned for their 2019 þan-þan exhibition as its nascency proctor. It is a secular and equal opportunities confraternity bound by chirograph. @neoflagellants is constituted of lay actants dedicated to the ludic, ascetic, aesthetic and athletic treatment and dissemination of neomedievalisms. Confraternity of Neoflagellants is an avatar for nonmodern world-building, a neomedieval theory-fictioning gaster-machine, a GAN-oracle of the not-yet-MHz. As a world-building electrostatic-#gut relic-ing technology, @neoflagellants patent pending nonmodern fictioning combines with mythopoesis: how premodern existences might be utilized against the impasses of hastily prescribed futures.
Related Programming
Performance: *219 Condemnations, Alive!, The Confraternity of Neoflagellants. Nov. 6, 2019. Knot Project Space.
Performance: *219 Heretical Marginalia, Alive!, The Confraternity of Neoflagellants. Nov. 7, 2019. Knot Project Space.
Workshop: Shift/Work [STATIC] Speculations, The Confraternity of Neoflagellants. Nov. 9, 2019. Knot Project Space.
Publication: þan-þan, The Confraternity of Neoflagellants, Punctum Books. Fall 2020.