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Sophie Seita

Staff details

Sophie Seita

Position

Lecturer in Fine Art & History of Art, Department of Art (Studio Practice), Director of Critical Studies, BA Fine Art Extension

Department

Art

Email

s.seita (@gold.ac.uk)

Goldsmiths Research Centres/Groups

Sophie Seita works with language as a material across performance, video, sound, textiles, books, and installations.

Sophie Seita is a London-based artist and researcher whose practice is grounded in language and performance but swerves voraciously into other mediums, such as sound, video, textiles, drawing, and installation. Her work has been commissioned, supported, performed, and published internationally, by Akademie der Knste (Berlin); Ruta del Castor (Mexico City); the Roberts Institute of Art and Hunterian Museum Glasgow; Nottingham Contemporary; Grand Union (Birmingham); Mimosa House; Ma Bibliothque; Queer Art Projects; Canada Council for the Arts; British Council; UP Projects; Literarisches Colloquium Berlin; Kunsthalle Darmstadt; JNU (New Delhi); the 87 Press; and others. Often working with others across disciplines, shes expanding and deepening her ongoing intersectional queer collaboration with the musician and conductor Naomi Woo, to give voice to untold or speculative archives and research queer ecology, as part of The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions.

Academic qualifications

  • PhD 2016
  • MPhil 2012

Teaching and supervision

I teach on the BA Fine Art & Art History in Studio Practice and on the BA Fine Art Extension Degree in Critical Studies; and supervise and examine projects on the PhD programme. I would be happy to hear from any graduate students wishing to work with me on projects related to my research interests.

Experimental pedagogy is at the heart of my work at Goldsmithsmy research and artistic practice develop out of and feed into it.

Research interests

Research Interests:
Lecture-performances, poetic essays, video essays, and practice-based research
Queer studies, trans studies, affect theory
Disability studies, deaf studies, creative access; experimental captions and audio descriptions as new performative and poetic genres
Speculative approaches to archives and history-writing; fictional collectives
Concepts of play, difficulty, opacity, absurdity, ornamentation, deep listening
Histories of experimentation and avant-garde group formation in visual art, poetry, performance, and independent publishing
Theories and practices of translation and multilingualism across literatures, cultures, and borders
Environmental research through community co-creation; queer and decolonial ecology
Experimental pedagogy, alternative education projects/programmes

Creative curiosities:
opacity, playfulness, difficulty, artifice, queer abstraction, weird things, small things, minor genres, but also ornamentation, the decorative, the baroque, the exuberant, language bubbling over, mud, muddiness, swimming in it (in language, in language as excess), tactility, materiality beyond objects, the materiality of language, listening, listening beyond 'hearing', listening with the body, things falling in and out of place, being confused, being surprised, leaning into or revelling in ambiguity, ambivalence, silliness, when things or practices are joyously not-making-sense, non-linear narratives, provisional ideas, finding the complex in the simple and vice versa, archives (historical/material and imagined/immaterial), the allegorical body, the conceptual body

Publications and research outputs

Article

Book

Book Section

  • Pearl & Theory Make Compost (2020) Seita, Sophie ; and Clayton, Kate. 2023. Pearl & Theory Make Compost (2020). In: UNSPECIFIED, ed. EMERGENCY INDEX: AN ANNUAL DOCUMENT OF PERFORMANCE PRACTICE, VOL. 10. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse. ISBN 9781946604101

Conference or Workshop Item

Edited Journal

  • The Minutes Seita, Sophie ; and Ort-Dinoor, Yael, eds. 2022. The Minutes, The Minutes of The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, 1 + 2.

Film/Video

Performance

  • Swimming in the Muddy Waters of Language (A Score for Verbs) Seita, Sophie . 2023. Swimming in the Muddy Waters of Language (A Score for Verbs). In: "Mud: The Urgency of the Arts", Royal College of Art, United Kingdom, 30 March 2023.
  • Reading the Rock Seita, Sophie . 2022. Reading the Rock. In: "Reading the Rock", Hoxton253, United Kingdom, 26 February 2022.
  • Beethoven Was a Lesbian Seita, Sophie ; and Woo, Naomi. 2019. Beethoven Was a Lesbian. In: "Beethoven Was a Lesbian", Café Oto, United Kingdom, 2019-2023.

Professional Activity

Project

Show/Exhibition

  • Cloudiness Seita, Sophie . 2023. Cloudiness. In: "Crossing Borders", Millbank Tower, London, United Kingdom, 2 - 5 November 2023.
  • bingenTV Seita, Sophie ORCID logo ; and Woo, Naomi. 2023. bingenTV. In: "bingenTV", Mimosa House, United Kingdom, 27 October – 8 December 2023.
  • withwithwith Seita, Sophie . 2023. withwithwith. In: "Pretty Doomed", Ugly Duck, London, United Kingdom, 12 - 15 October 2023.

Other

Professional projects

For a long time now, Ive researched the history and theory of experimentation across different art forms, how social and political issues find expression in or are subverted through form, as defined by different communities of practice. My first book of criticismProvisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital (Stanford University Press, 2019)described how literary and artistic communities are created through independent magazines and small presses which help us revise the canon, especially from a feminist angle. My current artistic research project Touching Language: Queer Writing In/As Performance is an autoethnographic exploration of somatics, queer abstraction, experimental form, and creative access methods in the context of text-based visual art and performance art.