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Reform or Revolution
The colonial and capitalist systems which run on the dehumanisation of others in order to create and uphold material wealth must fall. ‘Reform or Revolution’ visualises the struggle against these systems which present as permanent through a series of clips of myself trying to push boulders with all my strength. Set on the island of Dominica - a former British colony which is currently experiencing its 21st year with Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit - the piece was developed around conversations of the stagnation of (post)colonial political systems in an environment that is notoriously in flux. Hurricanes, landslides and floods constantly reshape the natural environment - forces which demand adaptability.
Myth and absurdity become queering tools to break away from the hegemony of current systems of power. What do we do when we are faced with the Sisyphusian task, an endless repetition? My current research looks into how performance, sound and movement have the power to shift physical institutions and systems of power. When taken literally it becomes clear that any form of change won’t come quickly or be achieved alone.
Refuge isn’t something that appears from nowhere, but something that needs to be built and maintained. This refuge might not be formed within our lifetime, but our efforts will benefit future generations. ‘Reform or Revolution’ invites us to spend time with this struggle, and consider what collective power is needed in order to create a shift.
dancing with the devil / a symphony of organs scattered over the floor
Photos by Ronan McKenzie
MA HA WISU, meet me at the crossroads by Nkisi
Exploring the immaterial legacies embedded within sound, artist and musician Nkisi collaborates with transdisciplinary artist Joshua Woolford in a new work for Assembly that sees music and dance used to decode and recode ancestral traditions and spiritual technologies.
Alice Yard Residency Exhibition
With the generous support of Chris Cozier and the rest of the Alice Yard team, I was invited to take over the entire space including the ground floor gallery, upper studio space and courtyard screening area. Journeying through and into the research and public interventions I had conducted mainly across Dominica.
between energy and event, Collaboration w/ Sippin’ T
Finding our asé, grounding ourselves within a space that craves uneven footing. A setting that has routinely thrown people like us into bureaucratic seas of uncertainty—seas with very real, tangible consequences. How do we craft a container of safety within places steeped in historical hostility? We call upon the elemental ancestors, known and unknown, those who carry luminance and benevolence. We offer them lavender, voice, and sweat, asking for their guidance, protection, and illumination as we navigate this witnessed search.
The portals are opening. The container is ready. Together, we prepare to journey through the root, heart, throat, and crown—on our terms. Will you witness us in our vulnerability? Will you remain with us in the thick of this unfolding? Will you join in this collective grounding, a process that weaves care and play into its fabric?
More questions than answers spiral through our bodies. We release them through breath, through movement—gentle, abrupt, deliberate. Through looking, seeing, writing, shouting, whispering, and responding with technical, vibrational and material bodies. We are in this together, bound by a commitment to ourselves and to all who choose to co-create this new ritual. A shared unmaking of the perfect.
Are we returning to ourselves, or are we becoming something new?
Performed during Rukus Live! at Somerset House
Photography by Anne Tetzlaff
Videography by Tanka Tanka
Wearing pieces by Rachel Freire, UY Studio and Yaz XL
forever in the loop of nonrepetitive return, Collaboration w/ Vivienne Griffin
Extending this idea to the looping, echoing and reverberating of sound where recognisable and repeated melodies make space and give way to improvisation. Call and response encourages an ever-evolving dialogue through electronic and acoustic instruments, movement of the body and vocals. forever in the loop of a nonrepetitive return is an experiment in tone, mood, form and collaborative work.
Born out of a desire to devise work that is emergent and liberated from a goal or completion, this work used the space as cite to fragment sound. Six speakers were dispersed throughout the space playing six separate channels, breaking away from the stereo output. The mix was made live and in this way was unique to each member of the audience depending on the position they had within the gallery - moving around the space exposed you to different versions of the same piece. Inherently site specific, no evolution of this piece will ever be the same as the last.
Other elements of the work which accompanied the electronic soundscape were a co-written text based on Griffin's PhD thesis, movement, live vocals, and a motorised self-playing harp processed through a modular synthesiser.
Photography by Chloe Page
Curator: A---Z (Anne Duffau)
The Eleven by FKA Twigs
New Dialogues with Sound
Responding to these questions throughout a year-long artist residency, Joshua Woolford has created six new sound pieces for the Tate Britain collection. Throughout their residency, they have explored the potential of sound to create dialogues with artworks through talks, sound pieces and live performances.
Over the last 12 months, Joshua Woolford has created and shared live performances at the Queer and Now festival in June 2023 and the Late at Tate Britain: Desire, Culture and History in August 2023. They have hosted a sound workshop with local youth organisation City Lions and held a reading group between Tate and iniva with PRIM, the platform for queer Black storytelling.
Woolford has actively explored the power and potential of ‘building communities around questions’. Throughout the residency, they have collaborated with a number of artists and musicians including Tawiah, Lie Ning, Tia Simon-Campbel (Sippin’ T), Tereza Delzz, Zein Majali, Kenichi Iwasa, Anne Duffau and Nwakke.
In response to Mona Hatoum’s Present Tense, Woolford has connected with Radio Alhara and Learning Palestine to create a sound piece. They have included elements from their 12hr radio programmes, excerpts from Jayce Salloum’s interview with Soha Bechara, alongside field recordings of artisanal soap-making in the West Bank of Occupied Palestine, recorded by Morgan Totah from Handmade Palestine. Through building these networks and dialogues around artworks, Woolford surfaces new narratives around Tate’s collection.
Photography by Anna-Lena Krause
Curator: Hannah Geddes
peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must
08:00 & 30:00 minutes
Exploring the rich history and experiences of members of the Caribbean diaspora here in the UK, Woolford has positioned themselves in dialogue with the countryside and rural environment in stark contrast to the English tradition of landscape paintings. Rather than showcasing serene stretches of land, Woolford’s piece consists of sharp movement and raw emotion screened alongside disorienting, harshly shifting environments which are in constant motion.
Filmed in and around one of the few surviving Chartist cottages in the Midlands whose political slogan ‘Peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must’ inspired the title of the piece, Woolford is both reflecting on their personal experience of being alone in a new landscape, as well as exploring the historical potency of an early 19th Century political movement whose protests, petitions and direct action paved the way for the working classes and non land-owning population of the UK to be afforded a voice within the political system.
Woolford’s piece continues a legacy of Black British artists such as Ingrid Pollard and Harold Offeh who position the Black body within the British landscape as a form of resistance, as well as referencing the role of Jamaican Chartist Leader William Cuffay in the advancement of the movement in 1840’s England.
Commissioned by RCA CCA 2024 cohort for The Enigma of Arrival
Dancing with the devil / a symphony of organs scattered over the floor
08:00 & 30:00 minutes
In the face of state-sponsored destruction worldwide, I’m trying to imagine what kind of liberation could be possible for marginalised and oppressed people in the face of social and political structures which seem to not be satisfied until they have pulled us apart.
Every day my heart breaks and I’m expected to pick it up and carry on. Triggering my metaphoric and emotional evisceration is the physical violence enacted upon literal human bodies. Trapped and besieged. A reality which my experience draws no comparison to. A reality in Palestine, in Congo, Sudan…
Throughout the performance simple interactions with external, natural and technological ‘organs’ are amplified through repetition, audio loops and electronic processing. Relationships established and maintained through proximity are reinforced and broken down. Fractured elements overlap and distract from each other. Tangled up between states of (unfulfilled) desire and despair (the Body Without Organs)
Photography by Sam Nightingale
Videography by Ramzia Jawara