No longer content with land, London Short Film Festival is mooring up for a weekender residency aboard the Air Draft.

A repurposed industrial barge-turned-inflatable theatre, the Air Draft (created by architects Thomas Randall-Page and Benedetta Rogers) is designed to float atop Hackney’s waterways hosting performance and play. Inspired by architect Jeffrey Shaw’s “floating city” Ant Farm, we’ve programmed two days of live performance and film, taking the Air Draft’s homage to public art and playfulness further down the rabbit hole of LSFF’s fascination with the pneumatic.

Cumbrian musician, costume maker, skin decorator, performer and provocateur Natalie Sharp (Lone Taxidermist) curates cake-sitting and short film, embracing the body’s beauty at its most grotesque and manipulated to its extremes, whilst a programme of archival documentaries look outwards to the interaction of self and space in the inflatables of community arts collectives such as Action Space.

LONE TAXIDERMIST PERFORMS TRIFLE

Fresh from the twisted machinations and fertile imagination of Cumbrian-born, London-dwelling artist and seer Natalie Sharp, Lone Taxidermist’s debut album Trifle is a gallery of grotesquerie not recommended for either the nervous of disposition or lactose intolerant. Arriving from a nocturnal world of sex and skullduggery, these irreverent and outlandish ditties exist on a unique psychic realm in which the profane and profound happily step out together on the lash - a collision between the high-maintenance and the kitchen sink that’s a feverish spectacle to behold.

The live experience of this musical and visual journey takes us into the unruly depths of sploshing, gender bending, food porn and squelchy mass ritual. Lone Taxidermist’s utterly bizarre and otherworldly dominatrix tactics, all wrapped up in plastic, turn audiences members into exhibitionists.

Invariably on the lookout for new and surreal dimensions of expression, Sharp’s malicious metier lurks somewhere between the eldritch diva manifestations of Diamanda Galas and the wry reflections of Victoria Wood, yet equally driven by a magpie spirit and conceptual chutzpah redolent of Leigh Bowery and an acidic wit damaged by John Cooper Clarke. It’s a stylistic path that has led to her being increasingly over-subscribed as collaborative maverick of choice for a dizzying array of artists, including recent work with Jenny Hval and Gazelle Twin.