'endless sprial of misunderstanding'

'All on the Same Page', by Tiphanie Kim Mall at Partial Versions, Cambridge (2025)

But I am excited by the fact that every other artist in London has a performance practice. Or is that just who I’m with?

Something about my education tells me that it's unfashionable to make with an audience in mind. That it's better to ignore them. Which I have done before. Not right now. I don't want to invite a group of people into the room to pretend that they aren't there.

In 'All on the Same Page', a sort of fly on the wall documentary-esque film by Tiphanie Kim Mall that coalesces various disagreements and winding conversations between an unnamed artist organising group. It is tense, sometimes non-sensenical and draining in the way that these non-hierarchical meetings often are. An 'endless spiral of misunderstanding', as one character describes it.

The work is the inaugural show at Partial Versions, a new gallery in Cambridge by curator and writer Amy Jones. It was filmed in the week or so prior to the exhibition at Partial Version with Cambridge-based artists and friends. What am I trying to get at? What interests me? What interested me was that it is presented as a film on a screen on a wall. The conversation was filmed at a dinner table in a house, in the room where the screen is. That this conversation was filmed in a house. Which makes me think of the family and how I said to Christine that I had spent the morning speaking with the gang I was born into. Why does family feel more like a space of organised harm than community?

When in an 'endless sprial of misunderstanding' decision making requires a continual and energised return to the basics of facilitation, listening and trusting ones own voice. These are skills we don't all have, but you could also say that a sour spirit goes long long unwashed.

At some point I was desperate to live in community and so post-uni I spent 3 years in an anarchist eco housing co-operative. It was successful in extracting houses from a capitalist market and welcoming people into affordable homes. I lived amongst people with deeply considered and powerful political beliefs. However socially the project failed to hear, support and truly see each other. This housing co-operative was incredibly dogmatic and fuelled a culture of policing one another at all times by the logic that governs us outside; racism, ableism, classism and transphobia. However, despite me leaving on bad terms (as in mistreated by one woman with a lot of power and founders syndrome, a sort of failed opera singer, and the severity being misbelieved by the entire community) I still feel so much empathy for the person that harmed me. Not in a Christian cheek-to-cheek way. But because I attribute her deep sense of fear and mistrust to the impact that the undercover police had on her psyche having been part of various activist groups that were infiltrated in their nineties and early two thousands. I think the consequences on political movements continues and it had a profound effect on this milleus ability to skill share, dream, organise with young people and trust. Many of this milleu are the most aggressive terf-anarchists in the country which feels oxymoronic because surely anarchy is predicated on a resistance to the states definition and domination over the body. LOL GET IT TOGETHER! WTF!

This was a wordy one but I do want to figure out how to talk about spying in relationship with acting, jesting and belief. But also the detrimental paranoia which makes the story of the paranoid impermeable. Can we let the narrative evolve? Please!