The Deep Energy Council

The Deep Energy Council is an invited and commissioned participatory research output within The Deep Council Series, an ongoing programme exploring relational curating, embodied methodologies and collective forms of knowledge production. Developed for Gray’s School of Art’s 140 Years forum, Anatomy of an Art School, the work formed part of a curated programme of invited provocations, performances and critical interventions examining the future of artistic education and practice. Presented at Aberdeen Arts Centre, the Council brought participants together through movement, vocal experimentation, resistance-band exercises and collective enquiry to investigate energy as material condition, social relation and speculative force. Drawing upon Aberdeen’s histories of granite, oil, labour and extraction, the work explored infrastructures of power, connection and collective experience through embodied and participatory forms of research. Extending Sarah Perks’ wider work on “wild curating”, The Deep Energy Council tested performative curatorial methods as mechanisms for generating alternative forms of encounter, participation and shared knowledge production. As an invited and commissioned contribution within a peer-context environment of specialist artists, researchers and curators, the work contributes to contemporary debates around expanded curatorial practice and experimental research methodologies.