The Engage Journal Podcast - Series 3, Episode 1: Everything I Do

The third series of our Engage Podcast begins with a takeover by artists Maria Ruban and John Lloyd where they work with a range of participants on a perpetual karaoke project to reinterpret the Bryan Adams’ hit song 'Everything I Do' alongside the world events that unfolded through its 16 weeks at No 1 in the charts in 1991. They discuss their methods of preserving joy in audience engagement as well as accessibility and why it is important that these elements within such work are sustained. 

Maria Ruban is an artist and lecturer of Ukrainian and Italian heritage based in Manchester, whose work focuses on reimagining personal archive and testimony through performance and film, challenging formal methods of archive interpretation. Recent work includes reinterpretation of archives at Royal Northern College of Music through ‘haunted’ performance working with local engagement. 'Through the Margins' was a decolonisation project at Portico Library Manchester that re-examined the historic collection’s influence on twenty-first-century life and society, asking ‘through whose eyes do we frame the world?’. Previous work includes film work for Manchester Art Gallery, Imperial War Museum and Whittaker Gallery. 

John Lloyd is an artist and lecturer, as a member of D∀RK his work is primarily concerned with exploring hauntological perspectives within contemporary media and playful explorations into the paranoia surrounding emerging generative technologies and their relationship to mysticism.