Earthly Accomplice at Crossness Pumping Station

Felix Taylor & Imani Mason Jordan

  1. 2023
  1. Beneath the Pavement, The Marshes

    An experimental performance by artist and composer, felix taylor, & writer Imani Mason Jordan, connecting research about Bexley's marshlands with wider narratives about blackness and ecological disaster

    A new version of Earthly Accomplice by artist & composer felix taylor, together with writer, artist & curator Imani Mason Jordan, is being performed right now at Crossness Pumping Station, & we feel very privileged to be witnessing this moving event within the incredible surroundings of a Grade-1 listed Victorian heritage site dubbed the "Cathedral of Sewage".

    This performance marks the culmination of Felix's 6-month residency at Crossness Marshes & is informed by their research into acoustic ecology & forced displacement within the context of Bexley’s complex marshland, as well as connecting to wider narratives about blackness, materiality & ecological disaster in the afterlives of transatlantic enslavement.

    Huge thanks to Crossness Pumping Station for the support.

    Earthly Accomplice is part of "Beneath the pavement, the marshes", a new creative programme bringing artists, activists and ecologists together with local environmental and community groups working in north Bexley, to explore the ground beneath our feet.

    felix taylor is an artist and composer from South London. His work uses field recording, musical composition, computer programming, radio broadcasts, collage and filmmaking. This year felix has released a composition for Philip Glass's Orange Mountain Music Label, commissioned for the composer's 85th birthday and is currently working on public installations for Turner prize-nominated collective Gentle / Radical, Croydon Borough of Culture and Three Rivers Bexley.

    Imani Mason Jordan is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor and curator interested in poetics and performance. Alongside Rabz Lansiquot they are one half of Languid Hands, who are lead curators of the artistic programme at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning. Recent independent projects include TREAD/MILL: WIP (Somerset House Studios 2021, and Aspen Art Museum, 2022); Atlantic Railton: LIVE  with Ain Bailey (Serpentine Pavilion, 2021) & Welcome Note in a Welcome Speech with Libita Sibungu (Gasworks, 2019; Spike Island, 2020; Sensing the Planet at Serpentine Galleries, 2021). Imani is the author of the pamphlet Objects Who Testify (PSS, 2019) as well as numerous articles, reviews, essays, poems, plays and love letters, some of which they have published.

    Crossness Pumping Station was built between 1859 and 1865 by William Webster as part of Bazalgette's London sewerage system redevelopment. The Pumping Station is situated at Crossness Sewage Treatment Works. Positioned at the eastern terminus of the Southern Outfall Sewer and the Ridgeway path in the London Borough of Bexley, it housed four steam-driven beam engine pumps. Today, the Pumping Station stands adjacent to Erith Marshes, a grazing marsh, with its northern section designated as Crossness Nature Reserve.