NINE

Have you ever wondered what it’d be like to be in a room filled with ghosts and spirits?

At an unusual time where escapism has become a more pertinent aspect of people’s everyday lives, the dynamic spatial soundscape of ‘NINE’ explores the mystic realms beyond established norms through a queer perspective. A 6-channel sound installation created by Glasgow-based artist Bobbi Cameron, ‘NINE’ draws upon Cameron’s autobiography and contemporary queer discourses to navigate realms beyond the human.

Stemming from an ongoing research practice that explores queer phenomenology, (dis)orientation and their combined effects on architecture and landscape, Cameron has embarked upon a journey encountering and sharing conversations with psychics and mediums to explore how communal disorientation could be experienced with spiritual beings. It was her intention to access this from a theoretical perspective, exploring how it feels to be connected with spirits and how these connections can alter our perceptions of space, place and architecture.

During the process of making this work however, Cameron was invited to step inside this realm to personally collaborate with spirits, ghosts and entities. ‘NINE’ is an outcome of this process, it explores the personal experiences of opening up your space to spirits, how it impacts those of us physically living and how it can change, not just our interpretations of landscape, but ourselves entirely.

‘NINE’ was first presented as an immersive 6-channel sound installation at CT20 Project’s space. The world of ‘NINE’ is now also available for all to experience in a digital format. It has been recreated by Cameron for a headphone experience condensing over 33 tracks, presented as part of 2021’s POW! Fringe Festival.

Gallery Image Credit: Nina Shen-Poblete

Bobbi Cameron is an artist based in Glasgow. Originally from a performance background, she now works predominantly across sound, text, and moving image.

Cameron is interested in how acts of queering can be used to dismantle and disrupt communal perspectives of space, place and (both constructed and bodily) architectures. Cameron works with giving documented and memorialised bodies agency within the gallery and seeks to experiment with how we encounter and perceive spaces. She is particularly interested in different perspectives of ghosting, blending the lines between documentary and liveness.

Premiered on CT20’s Soundcloud as part of POW! Festival 2021 and Surface Tensions Part 3: Art Under Lockdown.

Sunday 28 March 2021, 11am

This audio is an edited version made for the POW! Fringe Festival 2021 created by Bobbi Cameron. Find a quiet space, put on your headphones, close your eyes and experience the world of ‘NINE’.

Click here to download a large text transcript of the work.

Surface Tensions 2020 presents art that is deeply immersed in the traumas, struggles and violence of our time, from the perspectives of those on the margins, subverting established powers and narratives in a collective act of creative resistance, and questioning our relationships to Western identity and nationalism.

ST20 Part II: ‘Contra Culture’ – Site-specific Installation – Emerging from the plight of involuntary isolation, ST20 Part 2 presents a series of ambitious site-specific installations by international artists: Bobbi Cameron, Ned Pooler, Stefan Bruggëmann and Jaša. Together they subvert established powers & narratives by deliberately imitating, appropriating and mirroring existing conditions, juxtaposing them through a kaleidoscope of lived experiences.

Constructing a locus of instability and finding fortitude in the perpetual struggle between the inner and outer worlds, ’Contra Culture’ goes against the grain and defies the reactionary logic that exploits uncertainty and anxiety. Navigating the darker recesses of the human psyche against the bifurcating psychosis that permeates the global brain, when art is turning digital, it celebrates physical and material expressions as counterintuitive forms of resistance.

Surface Tensions 2020 is curated by Nina Shen-Poblete and Tomas Poblete, produced by CT20.

The project is kindly supported by Arts Council England, Roger De Haan Charitable Trust and Creative Folkestone.

In Conversation with Bobbi Cameron

CT20 co-director Nina Shen-Poblete invited Bobbi Cameron to discuss her personal connections to the work, and the immersive experience of its creation.