glorious ninth was a ten year (2001-2011) collaboration between Kate Southworth and Patrick Simons through which we attempted to devise a practice of everyday living and of everyday artworking. In 2007 we had to face the likelihood of a future without the tempo of the other. Unable to imagine what this future might sound like or feel like, we settled on trying to devise ways of coming to meet life and coming to meet death. This practice was informed by a politics of mutuality, non-assimilation and artistic communism; an ethics of tending, caring and attention; an aesthetics of fragility, vulnerability and telepathy. A new shared tempo emerged that took account of living, dying and ceasing to be. Out of our everyday living and everyday artworking some everyday performances emerged. These performances are a mix of living and art and include images, sound, words, slow time, sea time, lunar rhythms, technology, seeds, baking, gardening, parties, magic potions, spells, rituals, fragile protocols and tending. We worked on finding ways to understand, contextualise, document, record, archive and disseminate this distributed practice in a way that would enable ourselves and others to enact the everyday performances in our own homes and gardens in our own time.

Patrick died on June 11th 2011. Although a very soulful and possibly spiritual person Patrick was an atheist and Marxist and when I asked him if he thought it possible to have a collaborative practice with someone who was dead, his response was an absolute 'no'. So without that option, I hope to find new ways of working that enable me to continue our challenges to Capitalism as the unsurpassable horizon of our times (1).

Kate Southworth, November 2011.