Meeting point
The Street Headquarters - The Shop
26–28 Toynbee St
London E1
For the launch of The Street, Canal presents John Barlow Gone Offshore, an event orchestrated by Goldin+Senneby, the framework for collaboration between artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby.
Middlesex Street marks the shift from Tower Hamlets to the City of London. Sometimes called the “Wall of Fire”, the border between two economic realities will be host to Goldin+Senneby’s event. From this point, a guide will initiate a movement towards fictitious space, narrating the legal construction of offshore jurisdictions.
John Barlow Gone Offshore is part of Goldin+Senneby’s ongoing investigation of the offshore company Headless Ltd (and its possible connections to Georges Bataille’s secret society Acéphale). For Goldin+Senneby, the juridical construction of the Offshore is a performative act of fictionalising place and staging a realm of invisibility. In their research, they focus on a specific offshore company known as Headless Ltd, incorporated in Nassau, Bahamas, in 2002. Their enquiries and findings are continuously traced in a docu-fictional novel by writer John Barlow, also called Headless. As part of his collaboration with the two artists, Barlow travels to the Bahamas in search of the physical manifestations of Headless Ltd and, in a wider sense, the material staging of the fictitious place – or non-place – of the offshore incorporation.
For John Barlow Gone Offshore, two city guides lead the public into Barlow’s travels across the Bahamas and his possible findings. Mediating and contextualising the performative research in the offshore, the event proposes a staged inquiry into the undisclosable.
John Barlow Gone Offshore has been developed in collaboration with Disclosures, a Gasworks seminar (29-30 March 2008).
