HAMSTER Issue 5

This issue of HAMSTER Magazine takes the form of an expanded publication incorporating residencies, writers, workshops, collaborations, performances, and the texts that emerge from these collisions of bodies to flesh out the politics and potentials of relationships in writing. We are enunciating these relationships, and making visible the performed and contingent ways in which ideas and writing are achieved in relational space.

HAMSTER 5 has come together from the work of four writers assembling extended texts, and three residency artists that joined us in Ōtautahi to work on projects which fed and led to the written and visual contributions assembled for the magazine.

Contributors:
Lynley Edmeades
Pūkauri Productions
Jennifer Katherine Shields
Brooke Stamp, with Kayla Marshall, and Charlotte Filipov
Robin Murphy
Gemma Banks
Vanessa Crofskey

Editorial Group:
Jamie Hanton
Hamish Petersen
Michelle Wang
With assistance from Keren Oertly Ryan

Design by Jane Maloney, M/K Press
Printed by Allied Press, Ōtepoti
Cover Illustration by Caitlin Clarke

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HAMSTER 5 is also available as an audiobook, recorded by the contributors, mixed and mastered by Nic Pegg, and published on discs for libraries as well as digitally online.

Listen to individual tracks from the audiobook here.

It will also become available in more accessible formats within the digital databases of Blind and Low Vision NZ, and other providers. Thank you to Blind and Low Vision NZ, Dyslexia Foundation of New Zealand, and Judith Jones for their advice and widsom in preparing this audio edition. 

From 2020 you can find the audio edition physically in the public collections of:
 - Christchurch City Libraries
 - Te Puna Rakahau o Macmillan Brown, University of Canterbury
 - The National Library.

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Throughout September and October 2019 contributors ran workshops, rehearsals, collaborations, and working performances that fed into the writing which appears in the pages of HAMSTER 5. Below is an account of the portals we travelled through in order to publish [to making writing public], which opened up throughout the spring of 2019.

Jennifer Katherine Shields – sometimes my layers clash with your layers: a conversational writing workshop

On September 7 Jennifer ran a conversational workshop towards the development of their contribution last weekend and it spurred a deep, careful, and joyful afternoon of kōrero and poetic making.

Vanessa Crofskey - Inbox Anxiety

An Open Workshop, 12pm Saturday September 21 @ The Physics Room Gallery.

We live in an era of breakdown selfies and live-streamed performances. It's suffocating to be so close to one another, and yet feel so tangibly far away. Green dots flickering in and out of focus, searching for a way out of loneliness.

Live performance is similar to digital space in its tension between intimacy and isolation. Being online is a hyper-social and anti-social activity. How can we use IRL contact to understand URL disconnection? How can we forge strong connections in cyber space to rally against the world's major attachment issues.

Join artist Vanessa Crofskey in an attempt to recreate the matrix, modelling virtual modes of communicating in physical space. You are invited to contribute to a space of curiosity and play.

A Public Performance, on City Centre Streets, Sunday September 22.

Near the Gallery on Sunday September 22, expect attempts at public intimacy, private communication, and emails.

Pūkauri Productions, Tupono: A Working Performance

8pm, September 22 @ The Maker Workshop, The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora.

Please join us for a special working performance by HAMSTER 5 residents, Pūkauri Productions. Consisting of Kim Garrett, Sheree Waitoa, and Kihere Aumua-Jahnke and their collaborators, Pūkauri will share glimpses of a new work for theatre, based on the waiata of Sheree Waitoa. Free entry to the Maker Workshop via Hereford Street, on the corner of Rolleston Avenue.

Brooke Stamp, The line is a Labyrinth: a Public Performance

4:30pm, October 13 @ The Maker Workshop, The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora.

Brooke writes,

“Using the poetic motivation of “The Line is a Labyrinth”, we will explore movement practices that draw from embedded/embodied lineages, psycho-physical impulses, and apparitions that meet movement with memory, and impulse with language (sounded, physical, discourse). The residency invites local artists Mikaela Marshall and Charlotte Filipov into an active meditation on bodies and languages that build and haunt our residency infrastructure. We will develop a score that will culminate in a public performance, based on collaborative dialogue and strategies for tracing / transcribing / documenting echoes of spatial dynamics, language and movement, and the psychic loops emerging between them.”

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Thank you to The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora for their assistance with the HAMSTER 5 Residency Programme.