The Live Art Writers Network (LAWN) cultivates and supports experimental writing in response to live art and performance. Led by performingborders, this space seeks to address the lack of resources dedicated to critical, reflective, and experimental writing in the live art sector, particularly for practitioners whose work is informed by lived experiences of intersectional borders. LAWN looks to generate multidisciplinary, creative and critical responses to performance that respond to conversations happening on a local level whilst linking to transnational dialogue on performance, publishing, labour, and political action. Working in collaboration with writer and researcher Diana Damian Martin, this season of LAWN commissions focus on nonconforming editorial and writing practices.
performingborders will be commissioning a Glasgow-based artist Huss as part of Take Me Somewhere 2025. They will share a response emerging from their relationship to the city, the festival context and their experience of the programme.
LAWN has been co-commissioned with Fierce Festival (Birmingham, UK), METAL Culture (Peterborough and Southend-on-Sea, UK), DDD Festival (Porto, Portugal) and Citemor Festival (Porto, Portugal). To see writing and research from these collaborations: https://performingborders.live/
HUSS is an Arab multidisciplinary artist, performer, filmmaker, and programmer based in Glasgow. His work tackles queerness, memory, and exile, weaving together personal and political narratives that confront themes of displacement, censorship, and survival. Moving fluidly between film, performance, moving image, installation, sculpture, and sound, his practice creates spaces where fragmented histories and silenced voices can be heard, challenging dominant narratives that often overlook Arab and diasporic experiences.
His work has been shown nationally and internationally, from Cairo, Malta, Prague, and Kosovo to the V&A Dundee, Southbank Centre, and Edinburgh Fringe. He has held programming and curating positions at LUX Scotland and Refugee Festival Scotland, and he is currently a curator at the Scottish Queer International Film Festival.
performingborders is a collectively run platform for artistic research and creation, centred on notions and lived experiences of intersectional borders through live art and performance practices. performingborders is a knowledge-sharing platform created in dialogue with its contributors. Since 2016 performingborders has woven a digital and live tapestry of interconnected, cross-border experiments through interviews, artist commissions, open calls, publications, residencies, workshops, conversations, events, newsletters, and pamphlets – all freely accessible online. Co-run by Alessandra Cianetti, Xavier de Sousa and Anahí Saravia Herrera.
Diana Damian Martin is a writer, artist and researcher working on questions of borders, performance, experimental practices as well as alternative critical cultures and collaborative work. She co-hosts collectives Something Other, Department of Feminist Conversations, Critical Interruptions, Generative Constraints and is a programme leader for the BA (Hons) Performance and Contemporary Arts at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
This project is funded by the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama through UKRI Impact Accelerator funding.