06 Dec 25

CEL: FOUNDATIONS

Name: CEL: FOUNDATIONS
Start: 2025-12-06T11:00:00+00:00

As a culmination of their research residency at FACT, artists collective CEL will be hosting an open studio sharing the next phase of their Foundations project, building on their recent residency at LAS Foundation in Berlin.

Join us for this sharing of work in progress including a new podcast recorded and produced through conversations with Liverpool based creatives, community leaders and young people, and installations of new video works that build on the speculative fiction worldbuilding lore CEL have developed. The day will be structured around guided introductions to their research with the artists and live performance activations of the work.

FACT Liverpool
88 Wood Street
Liverpool
L1 4DQ
View on Google Maps

Gallery 2

Bookings

Event passed

Tickets no longer available.

CEL: FOUNDATIONS - NOISE IS OUR PASSPORT

During their residency at FACT, CEL have continued to develop their speculative fiction narrative, written in collaboration with Deforrest Brown Junior, building on their recent residency at LAS Foundation in Berlin. This body of work is now centred on an experimental performance based on the Griot; a West African storyteller, historian and musician. In this work, the Griot is a mysterious figure who orchestrates a mission to retrieve a stolen, intangible Black cultural artefact called 'The Hum'.

For this sharing event at FACT Liverpool, CEL are focussing on one strand of the broader project: exploring how Black vocal traditions and expressive singing function as cultural artefacts in themselves, containing information, encoded histories and technologies of preservation.

As part of the performance, a vocalist will demonstrate techniques that emerged in West and Central Africa and moved through migration. These include call and response structures that sustained communal identity through work songs and spirituals, preserving communication, identity and community; the bending and sliding of pitch often associated with blue notes and melismatic singing; and expressive interjections such as hollers, wails and ring shouts that became emotional language rooted in both ritual, musical and labour traditions.

In the project the voice is a vessel of defiance that stores what wasn’t written. For this reason, whilst the vocal demonstration takes place CEL will carry out a process of encryption, asking: how to create a form that protects itself?