Curation
I curate programmes relating to arts, culture, literature, and Centre around the different ways curatorial activism can be embedded in co-produced exhibitions, performances and programmes.
in tandem: live literature, politics and translation
in tandem: live literature celebrates the polyvocal across sound, meaning and language. It is a series of public experiments that brings together writers to create a performative reading series that expands what translation can be in live practice.
Featuring Berlin-based writers and translators, drawing on the notion of multiplicity and attempting to establish an idea of what migratory poetics sounds like in Berlin now, this evening will engage with live aspects of translation.
This series of experiments and public readings is a way of recording poetic language, practice, and performance that accounts for its contemporary multiplicity.
An individual writer’s voice may contain multiple voices and influences that surround what is finally shared out loud. What resonates in us is what resonates through others. in tandem: live literature is an accessible public gathering that is open to all which centers what is spoken, listened to, lived and resonated in the live space.
The live aspect to each reading is an integral way of making sense of the polyvocal nature of the poetry of migration. What is at home and what is un-homely; what is an experience of separation or dislocation; and what is an experience of translation. These readings may exceed what words and their definitions do – language can also be material, as part of an inflection, an in-breath, or a silence.
I am interested in how the live space, the structure and placement of the readings, and the different perspectives on the role of translation in each writer’s practice work together to create something meaningful and, even, political.
What it means to live in translation may also come to the forefront. Not just how it sounds, but the politics of explaining, conforming, assimilating into a majority language or culture. This is also a question of form and the possibility of creating live reading with silence and gaps, slips of tongue and breath, and words that will always, in some sense remain untranslated. What happens to the political act of translation when a writer finds mediums beyond language, re-makes a language for themselves, goes silent?
Interventions in Text
I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.
Wild Frictions
I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.
With Berlin's leading literary institute Lettrétage Literaturhaus Berlin and in collaboration with the Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature at Freie Universität, I am producing a series of performances and interventions by writers who's native language is not Geman. This will be a generative, live performance that has at its core the translation process, migratory poetics and the notion of the 'polyvocal' across language, meaning and sound.
More information: www.intandem.live
Prachtwerk, Berlin
May 2022
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ACUD Kunst Haus, Berlin
July 2022
Peter Szondi Institute, Freie Universität, Berlin
September 2022
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Interventions in Narrative
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Wild Frictions
In collaboration with Spike Island Associates at Spike Island contemporary art gallery, I curated and project managed an event series bringing together artists, designers, stakeholders and the community. A showcase of sound projects, art projects and writing on the theme of playful slippages, provocations with textual medium and mischief.
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Objects Of the Misanthropocene: Unearthing Futures
As part of UCL's Museums and Cultural Programmes Team, I co-curated the speculative exhibition Objects of the Misanthropocene: Unearthing Futures. Using the 'exhibition' medium as a way of communicating the fears, desires and pitfalls that the notion of the Anthropocene conjures. The exhibition in the Octagon Gallery is centred on the premise of a future museum that has sent objects back in time. These ‘time-travelling’ objects have been made by wide-ranging project participants across UCL and beyond. Many objects have been produced specifically for this exhibition. These sit alongside objects from UCL Collections and loans from the Museum of Beyond.
The ongoing reading list that framed the exhibition can be found here.​
Notes to Future Worlds From a Common Past at the Grant Museum of Zoology
As part of Invented Futures a curated a public learning and performance programme centred around the pitfalls, desires and fears tied up with the term, 'Anthropocene'. By activating the specimens, the oldest of which is 500 million years old, Notes to Future Worlds From a Common Past was a storytelling performance at the Grant Museum of Zoology, London.
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Using storytelling, objects and sound, this performance will animate the common threads that have passed through large upheavals and breakthroughs such as the first uses of growing and wilding practices in deep history, to the Green Agricultural Revolution of the 1950s, to the uncertainties of living within 'The Anthropocene'. ‘Notes to Future Worlds from a Common Past’ will incorporate the Grant Museum’s objects, specimens and history to challenge, re-define and prompt questions on climate justice, the relationship of imperialism to natural history, and the thread from deep history to speculative futures.
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Funded by the Being Human Festival 2022, The British Academy and the Institute of Advanced Studies London. More information about the programme can be found here.
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Uncommon Futures Invented Futures Lab / Object Learning Lab UCL
Invented Futures Lab is a workshop in response to ideas presented in the performance ‘Notes to Future Worlds from a Common Past’, premiered at the Grant Museum of Zoology on 10 November 2022. It is part of Being Human Festival 2022, led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. The workshop also responds to themes in UCL’s current exhibition ‘Objects of the Misanthropocene’. More information about this programme is here.
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Whether you are interested in a geological understanding of the Anthropocene, want to question the political beginnings of building futures, consider the impending climate apocalypse, or the wayward thread that pulls them all together, this is a workshop where we can speculate and imagine together. Whatever your starting point of knowledge.
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Disordered Minds, Disobedient Literature
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Does writing go against the political structures of madness? How do narratives of disorder shape their course in our lives? 2 Feb 2023. Ongoing reading series about disorder and the political with Literature Forum at Brecht Haus Berlin-Mitte and the Academy of the Arts Berlin.
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Does writing go against the political structures of madness? How do narratives of disorder shape their course in our lives? How has the phenomenon of disorder been assembled? The representation of disorder in narrative and performance provides a way of exploring the connections and disjunctions between diagnosis and identity, narratives of disorder and normality.
The evening will take the form of a performative reading, and the perspectives of those with lived experience form the basis of this evening.
Disordered Minds, Disobedient Literature is a public project funded by various sources such as University of Cambridge and MIND Foundation Berlin. It explores in public large questions surrounding culture and madness.
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