1 FEB 2025
19:00

2 Cygnet Square SE2 9FA Broadcast live on rtm.fm
FREE ENTRY

TACO! and Radiophrenia present blurt, an evening of sonic experiments in text, with new performances by Zara Joan Miller, Sophie Paul, Egg Meat, and Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau. We invite you to an evening of iridescent vernaculars, rarefied utterances, rhythmic memories, and other weird waves.


blurt is an experimental platform supporting artists to develop text-based works for live reading and performance, and synchronous live-to-air broadcast on rtm.fm. In this testing-site for testing text, four artists and artist-groups consider radio broadcast as an expanded form of publishing. We perform to publish, which is to say, to make public. And our moment of thinking is live on air!

Zara Joan Miller is an artist working across poetry, performance and film. Her work seeks to unravel boundaries between human and non-human nature, often playing with movement and sound as a way of reimagining a body’s rhythm. Zara is the author of poetry collection BLUE MONDAY (JOAN Publishing, 2022), which was also released as a duo LP with cellist Ute Kanngießer (Reading Group 2023). Her work has recently been presented at Barbican Centre, Muse Gallery, Horse Hospital, Cafe OTO (London), In Vitro (Brussels), Default Den Haag (Netherlands).

Zara Joan Miller will present Year of the Dragon. A mother draws a circle. Spins round. Pins everything but the tail on the donkey. She wants to know how the dragon makes fire, gets inside it. On the inside things slow. Written in the Year of the Dragon, Zara Joan Miller’s long poem traces fire across a year. The figure of Saint Margaret, who freed herself from the belly of a dragon, is relocated in living voices that challenge structures of oppression today. A year of feeding fire, of dousing and soft loving. A mother waits in disguise by the fire exit.

Sophie Paul is a designer and writer based in London. Her research is concerned with self-organised queer & feminist practices, and print culture. She writes about iridescence, girls, plastic, crystal, slime, and has been featured by New Contemporaries Journal, Kunstverein München x PlusX, Pilot Press, Passe Avant, and others. She is one half of the feminist press Sticky Fingers Publishing.

Sophie Paul will present The Crystal Monologues, an ongoing body of work that explores a re-conceptualisation of girlhood through iridescence, in its deceptive cunning. The performance will be located somewhere in the Arctic Sea, awash with the waxy undead bodies of sailors, jewels, and ice palaces.

Egg Meat is Tooth Rust aka Laurel Uziell and Georgie McVicar, featuring the vocal folds resonating inside the throat of poet Danny Hayward. The source of such rarefactions does not mean that some relation of identity can be drawn between the speaker, the sounds, and their segmentation into words. Maybe the words are spoken, but they do not speak: chopped and screwed and slopped and crude, worms writhing themselves through the loam, at times surfacing as meaningful utterances, at others buried under dense sonic matter.

Egg Meat will present Common Centrifugue, a piece developed out of a text which responds to the multiple synchronous temporalities of struggle and defeat, their loops and rhythms. Text and music evolve in a continuous dialectic, avoiding the pitfalls of simple mimesis or ekphrasis, and attempting to formally embody the tension between movement and inertia, as we bang our heads repeatedly on the supporting walls of big history hoping that something will break.

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau creates sculptures, drawings, paintings, performances and videos. His blackly humorous work addresses ugliness, taste, and the ambiguities of language and objects. He is currently undertaking a practice based PhD at Kingston School of Art where he is researching ambiguity in performance and video. He runs the MA Fine Art: Sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts. He was an Open School East Associate in 2014. He founded The Bad Vibes Club, which is a forum for research into negative states, and he runs Radio Anti with Ross Jardine. He lives and works in London.

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau will present The Green Man (Verruca/Pirate Voice/Song version), exploring the eponymous figure of the Green Man, an old god in a godless world who has been forgotten, misremembered and somehow also invented by modernity. And he’s not taking it well: he’s resentful, spiteful and bitter and he wants to tell you about it. Matt also has something to say about verrucas. And there is a song. It’s something to do with identity and shame, but also the limits of what it’s ok to complain about.


Blurt has been co-commissioned by TACO! and Radiophrenia with support from the Outlands Network Exchange programme.