GARETH EVANS

Gareth Evans is a London-based writer, editor, film and event producer and Whitechapel Gallery’s Adjunct Moving Image Curator. He is co-curator of Porto's Forum of the Future, Estuary, Flipside, First Light and Swedenborg Film Festival. He produced the documentary essay Patience (After Sebald) by Grant Gee and has executive-produced the feature-length artists’ films Erase and Forget (Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Berlinale Panorama 2017), World Without End (Jem Cohen); Unseen (Dryden Goodwin); By Our Selves (Andrew Kotting) and In Time: an Archive Life (Lasse Johansson). He conceived and co-curated Utopia 2016 at Somerset House. He created and programmed PLACE at Aldeburgh Music for its four year series there, as well as the national arts project The Re-Enchantment, and has curated numerous film and event seasons across the UK including ‘John Berger: Here Is Where We Meet’ and ‘All Power to the Imagination! 1968 and its Legacies’. He co-edits House Sparrow Press, whose recent publications include original titles by John Berger and Anne Michaels. He is a Trustee of Common Ground. His submission for PLACE 2020 was conceived in the extremely unsettling and unstable first weeks of ‘lockdown’, when previously established and reasonably secure definitions of both place and time were being directly challenged. The form of the text was shaped by a desire to register and respect the dizzying simultaneity of the multiple tiers of the ‘real’ while writing, and to acknowledge the accelerated role and presence of the internet in both writing and being. Links are links, and can be followed as far (or not) as the reader wishes, but in one way at least they do speak to a core intention of the essay: that 'relation', not isolation, is central to how we might make our way through and beyond this systemic threat, in ways that will reinforce the best of what we are, primed for the greater challenges to come.