Mobile Academy presents: Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge

Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge. Photo by Stephan Beer

Date: Saturday, 29 November 2008 | 7:00pm - 11:30pm

Location: the Bluecoat.

Ticket Prices: Free (on the day you can book an expert for £1)

'No.11 on WASTE: The Disappearance and Comeback of Things'.

An Installation with 50 Experts, a Digression on the Rhetorics of the Dialogue and a Shadow Play for a Dialogue Duo.

A Blackmarket is an interdisciplinary research on learning and un-learning where narrative formats of knowledge transfer are tried out and presented. The installation imitates familiar places of knowledge exchange, like the archive or library reading room, and combines them with communication situations such as markets, stock exchanges, couselling or social service interviews.

Each Blackmarket presents a different topic, generating an encyclopaedia with local experts. In Liverpool the theme deals with the relationship between human beings and their material world, the moment when things lose their form, deteriorate, rot, explode, slide into decay; and when remembrance and forgetting lose their distinction. In our ecnomy of waste, garbage is the repressed side of consumption, whilst non-biodegradable, radioactive toxins have made waste an ecological survival problem. In response to this we have developed a range of methods to stabalise waste, such as recycling.

At this new Blackmarket you can book a 30 minute one-to-one dialogue with one of 50 experts including garbologists, philosophers, economists, alchemists and psychoanalysts. Or you can observe and listen into select conversations via headphones on Blackradio's six channels. The experts will put together a lexicon that fragments, mirrors and hallucinates the theme of waste - through stories, theories, documentation and myths.

Mobile Academy is a project devised by Hannah Hurtzig with changing partners based at HAU, Berlin. Following ten Blackmarkets on different topics in Berlin, Warsaw, Istanbul, Hamburg, Graz, Vienna and other cities, this is the long-awaited first Blackmarket in the UK.

A full programme-poster, with details of the experts and their specialisms, is available from the Bluecoat, or you can download a PDF Encyclopaedia of Experts here:

Blackmarket List of Experts

Presented in association with the Live Art Development Agency.

Supported by Arts Council England, Liverpool Culture Company and the Goethe Institut Manchester.

If you are travelling up from London for Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge, please be aware that unfortunately engineering works will be taking place on the weekend of 29 & 30 November, causing disruption to trainlines between London Euston and Liverpool Lime Street. For this reason we recommend using National Express for your journey. http://www.nationalexpress.com/

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