Collective Ending presents BLO.ATT, an exhibition of two collectives BLOAT and ALL TERRAIN TRAINING (ATT). This is the second exhibition of our open call, with the aim to continue to expand our community of emerging artists by asking artist’s who we have worked with in the past to propose a duo show with an artist we haven’t exhibited before.

BLOAT presents footage from their residency in Yorkshire (2020) exploring sites of historical and natural significance within the Peak District National Park and the Yorkshire Dales. Understanding the transformative potential of collective knowledge, they started by exchanging research on land access, Right to Roam, symbology of uniform, psychogeography and folklore. The residency became a playful topographical study and the naive act of wandering became a means of investigation. Recalling playground activities from childhood, BLOAT considers this first moment of learning how to engage in a group as crucial in developing an understanding of how to adapt, listen and support those around you.

Game play emerged as a key framework for BLOAT, celebrating its potential for bringing people together. The one rule they followed was the absence of winners and losers, as all members of the collective and all bodies are of equal importance. The land became a stage and the features of the space would dictate the type of game that would be played within it. The games questioned the meaning of shared achievement over an individual one, and what it means to remove achievement entirely?

Both ATT and BLOAT find inspiration from the continuous and relentless energy found in natural phenomena. Specific to the sound of Arctic glaciers and seismic vibrations, ATT members endure engaged physical contact, taking it in shifts to maintain a communal tension. The group seeks to work in parallel with scientific explanation in a way to connect us to our active planet in a more visceral way.

ATT’s current formula involves its revolving members challenged to endure engaged physical contact, taking it in shifts to maintain a communal tension over extended periods of time. Embodying the collected field recordings of Arctic glaciers and tectonic tremors, dancers use contact to think through the physical, wired into an ever-changing somatic organism. ATT members make individual adjustments that create the group's unique outcome, equally affecting and affected by people’s decisions to move.

For this exhibition, ATT presents a new short film Stadium (2021). Filmed at the Lee Valley Velodrome, Elizabeth park, Stadium exists at a time when dance within this context is being introduced globally, with the inclusion of Breakin' as a sport in the up-coming olympic games in Paris 2024. Parallel to BLOAT, ATT’s investigation of group objective references sport and its ability to bring people together.

The closing performance at Collective Ending HQ will consist of ATT’s navigation task. Lasting two hours, seven dancers endure engaged physical contact accompanied by a natural soundscape mixed live, rumbling and creaking around the space mirroring the immersive nature of the movement.