On 23 July 2021, artist Jay Bernard hosted a live conversation around their original sound work, Crystals of this Social Substance, at the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion. Crystals of this Social Substance is a 41-minute audio commission by Bernard, who invited eight young people living in neighbouring areas of South London to discuss money. In the sound work, we hear them search for the language to articulate their personal relationships to money and grapple with how and why it is unevenly distributed across their city.
𝗔𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸
Crystals of this Social Substance was commissioned by Serpentine Education in 2021 for Listening to the City, a programme that animated the 2021 Pavilion, designed by architect Sumayya Vally of Counterspace. Listening to the City drew on Vally’s ideas of the Pavilion as a ‘holding space’ for many stories of life in the city, and engaged with the sonic landscapes of specific London neighbourhoods.
The work has now been released on Serpentine Podcast as part of Sound Gallery, a series of artists’ audio commissions which invite active listening. Search Serpentine Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts to hear more Sound Gallery commissions, including works by Brian Eno, Ain Bailey and Torkwase Dyson.
𝗔𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁
Live event contributors were Jay Bernard, Lola Olufemi, Marijam Didžgalvytė and Mijke van der Drift. Each participant was invited to present a proposition for a game about money in the 21st century, as a way to open up an imaginative discussion about our present economic reality and possible alternative futures. Following the conversation, Bernard’s audio work was premiered inside the Serpentine Pavilion.
Find out more here: https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/crystals-of-this-social-substance-the-conversation/
𝗔𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗝𝗮𝘆 𝗕𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗿𝗱
Jay Bernard is an artist from London whose work is interdisciplinary, critical, queer, and rooted in the archives. As well as being a film programmer at BFI Flare, they were named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2020 and winner of the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for Surge: Side A, a cross-disciplinary exploration of the New Cross Fire in 1981.
Event film by this is tomorrow.
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