The first Folk Horror Revival event will be taking place at the British Museum, London on October 16th 2016, featuring talks, lectures, short films, poetry readings, museum tours and other wyrd and intriguing happenings.
Cult television programmes and films of the 1960s and 70s are inspiring a new generation of poets, writers, artists and musicians with their atmospheric themes of contemporary individuals interacting with a uniquely British world of ancient mythology and magic, often uncanny and unsettling.
This special event will feature lectures, film screenings, performances and gallery tours of featured objects in the Museum’s collection to explore themes of cultural rituals, earth mysteries, psychogeography and folklore. Come along and prepare to be scared!
Ticket details to be announced very shortly.
We are proud to reveal other additions to the line up – see also
Folk Horror Revival: British Museum Otherworldly (First Reveal)
Folk Horror Revival: British Museum Otherworldly (Second Reveal)
Folk Horror Revival: British Museum Otherworldly (Third Reveal)
Folk Horror Revival: British Museum Otherworldly (Fourth Reveal)
Folk Horror Revival: British Museum Otherworldly (Fifth Reveal)
Iain Sinclair is a Welsh writer and filmmaker documentarist, poet, flaneur, metropolitan prophet and urban shaman, keeper of lost cultures and futurologist. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.,.
His early books Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders.
Sinclair was for some time perhaps best known for the novel Downriver (1991). It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics. Radon Daughters formed the third part of a trilogy with White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Downriver.
Much of Sinclair’s recent work consists of an ambitious and elaborate literary recuperation of the occultist psychogeography of London.
One of a series of works focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject. It describes a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London’s outer-ring motorway, on foot. Sinclair followed this with Edge of the Orison in 2005, a psychogeographical reconstruction of the poet John Clare’s walk from Dr Matthew Allen’s private lunatic asylum, at Fairmead House, High Beach, in the centre of Epping Forest in Essex, to his home in Helpston, near Peterborough.
At the Folk Horror Revival: Otherworldly event Iain will be engaging in a Q and A discussion with Folk Horror Revivalist John Pilgrim before it being opened up to audience participation 🙂
Also joining us are Yvonne Salmon and James Riley, Cambridge University academics and creators of the excellent Alchemical Landscape Symposium
Yvonne Salmon: Affiliated Lecturer; Cambridge University Counterculture Research Group Chair
Yvonne’s research and teaching stretches across the Cambridge University English, Art History, Law and Land Economy departments. She chairs the Cambridge University Counterculture Research Group, convenes the Alchemical Landscape project and was formerly convener of the CRASSH Screen Media Group. Interests include film theory, visual culture, British, American and European cinema, documentary. Recurrent themes include censorship, recording, language and power, counterculture, subcultures, gender and psychogeography. She is also active in film making and documentary production.
James Riley is Fellow and College Lecturer in English at Girton College. James is currently working on two book projects: Playback Hex, a study of William Burroughs and tape technology and Road Movies, a psychogeographic study of cult film. He is also co-directing The Alchemical Landscape, a research and public engagement project looking at notions of magic and geography.
Between 2010 and 2013 James developed and directed an editorial project linked to the archives of the film-maker and novelist Peter Whitehead. This international collaborative project yielded a series of publications with Wayne State University Press and Adam Matthew Digital.
James blogs at Residual Noise and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Research Interests
British and American literature; literary and critical theory; Beat writers, especially Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Alexander Trocchi; literature and technology; recording, noise, cybernetics; counterculture and the 1960s; postmodernism, posthumanism and related writers, particularly J.G. Ballard; experimental cinema; terrorism; Forteana.
Casting asn eye over Britain’s mystical landscape they will bring a mixture of magick and media to the British Museum with the inclusion of Derek Jarman, John Dee and more besides in their fascinating talks.
In addition to our speakers and performers Lee Gerrard-Barlow is offering his expertise on tours of the galleries that will focus on the occult and esoteric aspects ofthe museum’s collections
Lee has been working therapeutically with trance states ‘Meditational’ and ‘Yoga’ based practices for the last 20 Years. Lee learned the arts of Magnetism (mesmerism) and Fascination with the father of Mesmerism re-birthing – Dr. Marco Paret and studied at the Institute of Clinical Hypnosis in London. He trained as an “N.L.P Master Practitioner” under Dr.Richard Bandler’s “Society of Neuro Linguistic Programming” and studied deeply ‘Hypnosis’ and Hypnotherapy with The “Institute of Clinical Hypnosis” in London He has since Authored many articles on these subjects in various Magazines and in internet Journals.
Aside from these impressive credentials Lee also regularly gives tours of The British Museum focusing on Ancient Egyptian Magical practices by using the collections in the Egyptian Galleries to explain and illustrate. He has very kindly offered to trim his day long comprehensive tour down to a mere hour for those attending the FHR event. There will be one of these amazing tours during the morning session and then again after lunch. I think we can all agree that the inclusion of Lee in the line-up is of major benefit to not only the FHR event but also to The British Museum itself.
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Folk Horror Revival & Urban Wyrd Project ⨘ 