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(para)site: a sea change

By zack mennell 2025 - 2026

Baiba Sprance

a performance to camera made with Leon Clowes, Baiba Sprance & Marco Berardi.

Drawing on folklore, archaeology, and contemporary mythmaking, zack mennell imagines a series of mutant, cryptid beings emerging from the sites where human structures have been overtaken by natural processes. In these overlapping layers of prehistoric ritual, imperial ambition, industrial collapse and ecological crisis, zack’s strange beings corrode temporal boundaries.

Ancient belief systems infect new ruins; mystical residues leak into the infrastructure of late capitalism; industrial sites are revealed as the vacated flesh of Empire; and the Estuary's pylons, quarries and riverbed are haunted by cruising creatures, corrupted gods and half-remembered rituals - signals from past and future worlds, flickering within the present.

This work premiered during the COMMON HOST weekend. Produced by Future Ritual.

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