Setlist (2025)
Patrick Ross-Hunt
“So what’s your take? Reading in the garden a chapter that won't end. Talking about grief, bringing up grief, being reminded of your own numbness to it by someone else’s earnest expression. You turn another page. Do not disturb. You see over the fence-line your neighbour’s stairway. You hear them open and close their back door, periodically. The doors and windows have metal guard rails- like some kind of protection from the outside… or maybe keeping someone in. Like a holding cell. They come out onto the stairwell and drape their sheets onto the banisters.”
This piece originates from a found festival setlist, discovered backstage and stripped of its original function. The song titles are repurposed as structural anchors and generative constraints, prompting a sequence of fragments that depart from — rather than explain — their source.
The opening page, “INTRO,” presents an arbitrary glossary of categories — factual, fictional, satirical, personal, historical — mimicking the classificatory language of publishing while quietly refusing coherence. From there, the work moves between essay, poetry, exhibition review, short fiction, and fragments of film dialogue, disregarding the logic it initially appears to establish.
By adopting and undermining the conventions of publication, the text embraces arbitrariness as method, allowing meaning to emerge through juxtaposition, displacement, and the act of responding itself.
