- Date & Time: October 10th at 7pm-9pm
- Venue: Rame Projects, Studio 16, Maker Heights
- Capacity: 40 people
- Duration: 100 mins minimum
Join Dr. John Troyer and artist Jordan Baseman in this participatory screening and discussion group focused on Derek Jarman’s Blue at Rame Projects
About this event
John Troyer has chosen Derek Jarman’s film Blue, about the AIDS epidemic and Jarman’s own dying from AIDS, as the starting point for this Reading Group and discussion. Through its unchanging field of blue and overlapping soundtrack of voices, memories and reflections, Blue presents an unflinching meditation on life, death and the body.
John will begin by introducing his own work and how the ideas explored in Blue relate to his research, practice and personal experiences. We will go on to discuss the film in relation to broader questions around loss, absence, dying and remembrance, reflecting on how sound, language, and image can evoke both personal and collective experiences of mortality.
Participants are invited to share their own reflections during the session and to respond in creative ways—through conversation, note-taking, drawing, or writing. An art therapist will be present to offer additional emotional support throughout the event.
Following the discussion, participants will have the opportunity to create contributions for the DeathLand Reading Group zine. These can take any form—drawing, poetry, prose, reflections, short stories—and will be included in the publication with no censorship or editing. Contributions are limited to one side of A4 and can be made during the event or submitted afterwards, by Sunday 30th November 2025. The zine will be published in print and digital form to coincide with the Winter Solstice, compiled by Jordan Baseman with a foreword by him. All contributors will receive a copy.
Please get in touch with us at rameprojectscornwall@gmail.com if there is any way in which we can support your participation in the event, or if there is any information that would be helpful for us as event organisers to know—for example: allergies, access requirements, etc.
Let us know if you’d like help arranging a lift from Cremyll to the studio – we’ll do our best to coordinate, but please note the last ferry back to Plymouth is at 18:30, so lift sharing is better.
Dr. John Troyer is the Death Studies Scholar-at-Large and former Director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. He is a co-founder of the Death Reference Desk website, the Future Cemetery project, and the author of Technologies of the Human Corpse (MIT Press, 2020). He grew up in the American funeral industry.
