Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture 2021
This film was made to compliment the annual lecture in memory of Mark Fisher presented by the Visual Cultures Dept. of Goldsmiths, University of London. It was conceptualised by Test Dept together with Alexei Monroe and Peter Webb to explore their legacy through the lens of some of Fisher’s key concepts. It was reconfigured from Test Dept archive footage by Ludmilla Andrews.
“There is something very timely about the return of Test Dept… [they] have arrived just in time for the deep crisis of neoliberalism in the UK” Mark Fisher, 2015
When he visited Test Dept’s DS30 installation in Newcastle, Mark Fisher found much to inspire him and met with the group. In a subsequent article he described their work as an example of radical ‘popular modernism’ which could still be highly relevant in the present day.
Fisher described the documentation of their work in the book Total State Machine (2015) as an ‘invaluable archive, an inventory of strategies, gestures and techniques’.
Test Dept worked intensively in and around Goldsmiths and the local area in the 1980s. The film explores a series of key themes and questions, relating Test Dept’s history and current work to the multiple political, social and cultural challenges of 2021.
Can popular modernism still have an effect in the 21st Century, as Fisher believed it could? What lessons are there for today in the way that Test Dept operated in harsh environmental, economic and political conditions? How did Test Dept create its artistic ‘fuel to fight’ from ruinous conditions and spaces and is it possible to imagine something like this in our own increasingly ruinous political and economic conditions?
Vimeo Link: NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND ||| TEST DEPT