Photo by Hugo Glendinning
10 posts for 10 years of Vincent Gambini
N.2
'This is not a magic show'
I love it when works come about through chance invitations: when someone outside of you intuits a potential you don’t (or not yet), and invites you to pursue it.
I have to thank again artists associated with Rhubaba Gallery, Edinburgh, back in 2014, whose invitation to spend a month there enabled me, very quickly, to develop and assemble the main planks of the first Gambini performance, ‘This is not a magic show’.
We produced a lovely interview booklet with the gallery’s inhouse printers (deets below), had a great public conversation with Glasgow’s Prof. Carl Lavery about enchantment, and generally revelled (prank-adjacently) in there being two artists in residency, Augusto and Vincent.
For some reason the part that people remember the most from the show is the card illusion I call ‘Neuromagic’, with the absurd premise of a science lab gathering insights by asking people to vocalise their reactions to a card trick, producing a text which I read out whilst performing said card trick. A kind of odd mirror held up to the audience in the show.
With Arts Council England funding, and in the capable hands of uber-producer Sally Rose. ‘This is not a magic show’ has been presented in multiple UK theatres, fetivals, community halls, art galleries, on a canal boat, a library, a bookshop. And Daniel Kitson liked it.
As of 2024 I still occasionally perform the work, it’s become a second skin. I thought it would age badly, a piece made before Brexit, Trump, Covid, the culture wars. But it’s oddly refreshing to revisit this show about a magician who doesn’t quite know how to start, and where different layers of fiction are played with and peeled back.
The booklet and interview are available for free at http://www.vincentgambini.com/bookshop.html
N.2
'This is not a magic show'
I love it when works come about through chance invitations: when someone outside of you intuits a potential you don’t (or not yet), and invites you to pursue it.
I have to thank again artists associated with Rhubaba Gallery, Edinburgh, back in 2014, whose invitation to spend a month there enabled me, very quickly, to develop and assemble the main planks of the first Gambini performance, ‘This is not a magic show’.
We produced a lovely interview booklet with the gallery’s inhouse printers (deets below), had a great public conversation with Glasgow’s Prof. Carl Lavery about enchantment, and generally revelled (prank-adjacently) in there being two artists in residency, Augusto and Vincent.
For some reason the part that people remember the most from the show is the card illusion I call ‘Neuromagic’, with the absurd premise of a science lab gathering insights by asking people to vocalise their reactions to a card trick, producing a text which I read out whilst performing said card trick. A kind of odd mirror held up to the audience in the show.
With Arts Council England funding, and in the capable hands of uber-producer Sally Rose. ‘This is not a magic show’ has been presented in multiple UK theatres, fetivals, community halls, art galleries, on a canal boat, a library, a bookshop. And Daniel Kitson liked it.
As of 2024 I still occasionally perform the work, it’s become a second skin. I thought it would age badly, a piece made before Brexit, Trump, Covid, the culture wars. But it’s oddly refreshing to revisit this show about a magician who doesn’t quite know how to start, and where different layers of fiction are played with and peeled back.
The booklet and interview are available for free at http://www.vincentgambini.com/bookshop.html
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