Episode 1: 27 Jan 2021 Episode 2: 10 Feb 2021 Episode 3: 24 Feb 2021
Light+ Collective Imaginings
Collective Imaginings is a Light+ podcast where Jamila Prowse speaks to cultural workers about their experiences of navigating the sector, and their imaginings for the future of the arts. The series will consider how these cultural contributors work to break down barriers to the arts through their own work, as well as the strategies and support systems they have personally developed for surviving in the arts.
Following on from the work of Eva Rowson, the series will act as a resource tool for independent artists and curators, as well as people considering a career in the arts, around how to make things work, challenges one might face, and how to maintain a practice in the face of adversity.
In light of COVID-19, the series will bring together dialogues around the wider precariousness of the arts, and think through how and whether artists and arts practitioners are continuing to make work and make ends meet in these increasingly uncertain times.
A full transcript will be released with each episode.
Episodes
Episode One – Jamila speaks to cultural workers about their experiences of navigating the sector, and their imaginings for the future of the arts. Jamila speaks to Lucy Lopez and Rachel Noel about everything from creating communities, to informal meeting spaces, art-world-burnout and carving out space for ourselves and one another.
Show notes
Abondance Matanda - The First Galleries I Knew Were Black Homes, published in Know Your Place: Essays on the working class, by the working class, Ed. Nathan Connolly,
Mia Mingus - The Four Parts of Accountability: How to Give a Genuine Apology part one
Mia Mingus - The Four Parts of Accountability: How to Give a Genuine Apology part two
Transcript: Light Collective Imaginings EP1 Transcript
Episode Two – In conversation with Jemma Desai, join the discussion about their experiences of navigating hostile and inhospitable institutions, and ways we have found to protect our imaginations and resist capitalist productivity.
Show notes
Jemma Desai This Work Isn’t For Us
Jemma Desai in conversation with Rabz Lansiquot
Jemma Desai in conversation with Zarina Muhammad
Jemma Desai in conversation with Aditi Jaganathan
Evan Ifekoya’s resignation letter from Goldsmiths
Evan Ifekoya’s 100 days since resignation statement
Tate United: Against Tate Redundancies
Save our Southbank: against Southbank redundancies
Southbank redundancy contract shared by The White Pube
Lola Olufemi’s Feminism Interrupted
Transcript: Light Collective Imaginings EP2 Transcript
Episode Three – Joined by Deborah Joyce Holman and Rabz Lansiquot, both of whom continue to hold space, build communities and nurture the many people around them through their work as curators and artists. A discussion about collectivising, care and the limits of representation.
Show notes
1.1, Basel
Languid Hands Cubitt Gallery Fellowship
Languid Hands Cubitt Gallery statement
Sorryyoufeeluncomfortable collective
Letter from Culture Secretary on HM Government position on contested heritage
Transcript: Light Collective Imaginings EP3 Transcript
About the Curator/Host
Jamila Prowse
Jamila Prowse seeks to interrogate and dismantle the colonialist, racist and ableist structuring of the art sector through filmmaking, curation, writing, and collective organising. Her practice is engaged in collaborating with art workers, as an antithetical method to the alienation of being a BIPOC working within, alongside and adjacent to white institutional settings. Presently, her ongoing research Can We Surv[thr]ive Here? considers the potentials and limitations of institutional work for Black, non-black People of Colour, and disabled artists and art workers, and is informed by Jamila’s own experiences of being a mixed-race curator with lifelong mental illness. As a member of the working group Hypericum: A Code of Practice, initiated by Obsidian Coast, Jamila will contribute to a collectively produced, ever-evolving code of practice for feminist, antiracist, anticolonial and environmentally sustainable arts organising.
In 2020 Jamila is the recipient of the GRAIN writing bursary, is Guest Editor of Photoworks Annual 26 and is curating and hosting an upcoming podcast series for Lighthouse. Jamila has curated exhibitions for Peckham 24 (London), 1-1 (Basel), Lighthouse (Brighton) and Brighton Photo Fringe, hosted public programmes for Fabrica Gallery (Brighton), Photofusion (London), Deptford X (London), University of Brighton and Brighton Photo Fringe and written for Dazed, Art Work Magazine and Photoworks. For more information on upcoming work and past projects visit her website.
About the Speakers
Lucy Lopez
Lucy Lopez is a curator, researcher and writer, and together with Alba Colomo is co-founder of la Sala, a small art organisation in Nottingham focusing on ecology and care. She is currently writing up her PhD, Instituting with Care, a partnership with Eastside Projects and Birmingham School of Art, and is working on an edited book of the same name. Her work draws on feminisms, practices of care, and the politics of work.
Most recently she has curated exhibitions for Grand Union, Eastside Projects, and BALTIC, and was previously Curator of Exhibitions and Research at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst. In 2014 she co-founded the London based art organisation Jupiter Woods. She has lectured and taught internationally, and her writing has recently been included in Temporary Art Review, Art and the Public Sphere Journal and in the publications Who’s Art For? Art Workers Against Exploitation, postmedia books, and FORMER WEST, MIT Press.
Rachel Noel
Rachel Noel is a curator, researcher and producer whose work explores radically inclusive museum futures with and for young people. She is interested in true institutional change and leads the Young People’s Programme at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. Rooted in equity and anti-oppression, the programme is co-produced with young people, artists, thinkers, makers, collectives and a wide range of youth and education partners locally, nationally and internationally – and explores the contemporary youth experience in the world today, through art.
Jemma Desai
Jemma Desai is a born and bred Londoner whose current practice encompasses research, writing, performance and informally organised settings for deep study. Her most recent body of work is "This work isn't for Us” which draws attention to the human cost of attempting institutional reform while navigating 'diversity' policy rooted in white supremacy.
Deborah Joyce Holman
Deborah Joyce Holman is an artist and curator. The notion of authorship, strategies of refusal, and the destabilising of boundaries between fiction, truth and facts are recurring themes in her work. This is done through a variety of media, such as text, sculpture, installation, film-and image-making. Her work has recently been shown at La Quadriennale di Roma (2020); Material Art Fair, MexicoCity; A Soft Spiral(solo), Mikro, Zurich; Fondation Entreprise Ricard, Paris; Auto Italia, London; Live InYourHead, Geneva; Alienze, Lausanne; Topic, Geneva; Locale Due, Bologna, among others. Upcoming exhibitions include food culture days in Vevey (2020).
She is the co-founder and director of 1.1, a platform for early-career practitioners in arts, music and text-based practices, with an exhibition space in Basel, Switzerland, which ran 2015-2020. She has curated the group shows...and their tooth, finest gold(2018) and Cinders, sinuous and supple(2019)for Les Urbaines in Lausanne, the BBZ BLK BK: Alternative Graduate Show 2019at Copeland Park, London and currently works at the artist-run organisation Auto Italia in London as Associate Director.
Rabz Lansiquot
Rabz Lansiquot is a filmmaker, programmer, curator, and DJ. They were a leading member of sorryyoufeeluncomfortable (SYFU) collective from its inception in 2014. They work alongside Imani Robinson as the curatorial and artistic duo Languid Hands, who are the current Cubitt Curatorial Fellows. Rabz was Curator In Residence at LUX Moving Image in 2019, developing a public and educational programme around Black liberatory cinema. Their first solo exhibition where did we land, an experimental visual essay exploring the use of images of anti-black violence in film and media, was on view at LUX in Summer 2019, presented alongside a programme of screenings and a study day.
They have put together film programmes at the ICA, SQIFF, Berwick Film & Media Festival, were a programme advisor for London Film Festival’s Experimenta strand in 2019, on the selection committee for Sheffield Doc Fest 2020 and are currently a programmer for 2021. Rabz is also training to deliver workshops in working with Super 8 and eco-processing at not.nowhere.
About the Podcast
Co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, part of Re-Imagine Europe. With support from Arts Council England.
