Joseph Morgan Schofield
VSSL co-director, studio artist & exhibited artist
devotion : seduction, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Venice International Performance Art Week 2020. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
“I work with action and words. I understand my works as acts of mythopoesis, as process driven embodiments of different ways of being in other possible worlds. I think of art-making as technology of divination, a way to vision, prophecy or fiction [other] [queer] futurities.”
Joseph Morgan Schofield (b. 1993, Rochdale, UK) uses performance, moving image, writing and curation to explore the desire, ecology and the wilding of queer and trans* futurity. Joseph articulates their practice as ‘queer ritual action’, a term which speaks to their identity, the technology with which they work, and the artistic lineage within which they are situated.
This queer ritual action is relational, emerging through encounters between the sweating, wanting, sensate non-binary body and a host of other-than/human agents. They have engaged with the South Pennine Moors as muse and collaborator for a number of years, and also work responsively to different sites and contexts on other timer scales. Through practices of channeling, duration, exhaustion and divination, Joseph’s works hold space for processes of mourning, yearning, processing, dreaming and communing.
Acts of gathering and facilitation are central to Joseph’s practice, and their artistic work also involves curating, producing, mentoring and teaching. They organise FUTURERITUAL, a performance and research project considering ritual and queer futurity, and co-produce move close, a club night emerging from the intersection of electronic music, performance art and dance, with Es Morgan and Sara Sassanelli. In 2021, Joseph co-facilitated The Sunday Skool for Misfits, Exprimenters and Dissenters, an online performance art course with Martin O’Brien and Shabnam Shabazi, and FUTURERITUAL : MYTHIC TIME, a residential workshop with VestAndPage.
With Benjamin Sebastian, Joseph is a co-founder and co-director of VSSL studio (London, UK) and works as programme producer at The Place (London). Joseph is a member of Chisenhale Dance Space (London, UK) and of the Anam Cara collective (International), and they are a frequent collaborator of Venice International Performance Art Week (Italy).
Joseph has performed and exhibited throughout the UK – including at Chisenhale Studios, Tempting Failure, Arnolfini, Camden People’s Theatre and ]performance s p a c e [ - and Europe - including Venice International Performance Art Week.
www.josephmorganschofield.com
@jmschofield