Uncommmited Barnacle
A performance by Madison Bycroft

Uncommitted Barnacle is a new performance work by Madison Bycroft in which six characters (The Front One, Back, The Side Guy, Above-it, AWOL and Doug) speak, sing or sound from different locations. They explore their own direction, finding obstacles for expression, and architectures to move with or push against.

Thinking from a methodology of floating, an uncommitted barnacle tries to understand the biases that tether, orientate and ultimately limit our bodies, our desires and our stories, and against this, how they might be set adrift.

A wind arrives from a direction, and passing over a gap or through a hole, begins to sing. what are the conditions for whistling? a breath with a breath, a whistle joining another, and so, as a tempest, articulations become noisy and disorientating, edgeless and oceanic - composing a narrative that resists closure, resolution or accomplishment. Flop!

I offer you a journey without direction, uncertainty, and no sweet conclusion.
– Derek Jarman

Madison Bycroft (they/them) Born in 1987, Kaurna Yarta (Australia), lives and works in Marseille, France. Bycroft is a graduate from the University of South Australia (2013), and the MFA program at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2016). Working with video, sculpture and performance, Madison Bycroft’s current interests extend into forms of reading and writing, expression and refusal. The politics of illegibility and legibility are explored through language and material, asking how ‘sense’ is framed by historical contexts, biases, and structures of power. Maximum is interested in how we might re-imagine “reading” (in its expanded sense) and understanding, not as goal oriented towards accomplishment, but as a relationship that hovers and makes space: opaque, never arriving, ungrounded and floating. Here, floating is explored as a methodology of disorientation and a practice of pleasure that is not goal oriented and instead fractured, wandering, abstracted and planktonic. Bycroft's work has recently been exhibited in Biopic (Samstag Museum, Tarntanya / Adelaide, 2021), For Refusal (Transmediale, Berlin, 2021) Making Kin (Kunsthaus Hamburg, 2020), Feedback Loops (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm, Melbourne, 2020) Futur, Ancien, Fugitif (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2019), Future Generation Art Prize (Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev and Venice, 2019), À Cris Ouverts – 6e Biennale de Rennes (Saint-Brieuc, 2018), Desk Set (CAC Brétigny, Paris, 2018).

Nana (Anaïs Pinay) (he/they) is a Franco-Cameroonian artist. As an actor, writer and performer, his work revolves around postcoloniality, intersectionality and questions the links between politics, spirituality and representation

Leo Landon Barret (she/they) is a French actress and director based in Paris. After ten years of training as a singer at Paris’ Opera child choir, she studied acting at École du Jeu. She takes part in multiple projects as an actor, director, singer, performer or dramaturg.