tags_ sura medura

Proper Lanka

On tourism, and a tourist’s job.   I’ve been working in Sri Lanka for the last 6 weeks, although my visa is technically correct when it says I’ve been here on holiday. I haven’t been paid for what I’m doing in the country. Tanuja and I have made a short album of music and played… Read more »

Ocean confessions

It’s late in Week 4 of our Sura Medura residency. If last week was all about beats, tunes and noise; then this week’s been all about orchestral composing, performance text and the sea. Also a whole bunch of getting tangled up with wires, battery packs, live relay, headphone variants and playback devices in order to… Read more »

Human / Technology

So we’ve come to Sri Lanka, and we’re staying right by the sea, and now we’re working almost entirely on laptops with headphones. Our fellow artists here must think we’re nuts. To be clear, there’s no way we’d be inside our laptops like this if we hadn’t already had lots of experience in Sri Lanka… Read more »

Uncanny Lanka

Horse God The pantheon of gods in Sri Lanka is a complex hierarchy of beings ultimately subject to the cycle of birth and rebirth in the same manner humans are; a process that in Theravada Buddhism is widely accepted to last millions of lifetimes or more, until, after much suffering, enlightenment – and therefore the… Read more »

Practice Makes Practice

One of the main drives of these Sura Medura residencies is to push and take risks with our practice. The residencies are hosted by Neil Butler, who’s got strong form in making and producing radical art, and we’re all experienced artists, so it feels like a really supportive environment for embracing that challenge. We had… Read more »

People Take Pictures Of People

    Hikkaduwa 2018 On the beach a tourist couple are ankle-deep in the surf, and she’s performing the kind of frolicking you only perform at the edge of the sea if you have a camera’s gaze upon you. The boyfriend, a man in his late thirties, is insta-framing the early sunset behind his partner… Read more »

Ask me if I’m Sri Lankan

I think it was 2014, at the caravan showcase, when Bettina Linstrum first mentioned the Sura Medura residency project to us. Now it’s February 2018, and here we are, towards the end of Week 1 of a 6-week residency in the town of Hikkaduwa, SW Sri Lanka. It’s an extraordinary gift to be offered –… Read more »

The Museum Of Important Incidents

  The Museum of Important Incidents was established some years ago (precisely when is unimportant) in order to celebrate the truth. Fame and infamy and the works of so-called significant persons are often bright and noisy; often lauded as the ‘course of history’. But they have their own museums. Instead, we founded an institution to… Read more »