Centre of Somewhere

In tandem with the British Council’s fabulous new video showing the amazing work made possible by their International Collaboration Grants, we’re delighted to take a moment to reflect on 2023’s collaboration between The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Take Me Somewhere and The British Council.

About the project
Between Sept 2022- March 2023, this major international exchange supported four performance makers, two from Glasgow and two from Johannesburg, to create and innovate across cities. With the support of The Centre and TMS they explored new ways to build relationships for their practice, connecting with artists, audiences and communities in an embedded approach.

The six month collaboration between these two organisations invited two Scottish artists NXSA and Christian Noelle Charles to undertake a residency in Johannesberg, South Africa and two South African artists, Thulisile Binda and Kaldi Makutike to do the same in Glasgow. NXSA and Christian presented work created as part of the process in TMS Festival 2023.

“My time in the project also enabled me to undertake the research I intended in a way which affirms the body of work I'm forever expanding. In particular here the parallels on two continents of everyday, living, surviving, ever perpetuating legacies of colonialism in societies which deem themselves post colonial. I was happy with the balance I was able to achieve between meeting artists, working on new practice in the studio/being able to invite people in an ad hoc way once I'd grounded myself, which opened way for connections and enabled me to contribute to Kaldi's work through a basic new skill I'd developed” NXSA

Christian Noelle Charles - Photography by Zivanai Matangi

NXSA - Photography by Zivanai Matangi

“The chance giving apart of this project gave me the opportunity to let go because it was something unexpected, new, fresh to my eyes which being open to new things, surrounded my new environments and meeting new people are essential ingredients to be open minded and because of that the ideas flowed so easily and given me the space to produce again” Christian Noelle Charles

Additionally TMS were proud to host two South African artists within Studio Somewhere as return residencies. Thulisile Binda, a South African interdisciplinary dancer, performer and choreographer and Kaldi Makutike is a South African-born Congolese dance practitioner.

“This has given me an opportunity to look at  researching  more about ideas that I have as a creative going forward. Opening myself up to other disciplines and collaborating with different minds to allow my work to breathe different life  from what I am used to” Thuli Binda

“I utilised this opportunity greatly in networking and building relationships with artist from Glasgow as well as Johannesburg” Kaldi Makutike.

Thuli Binda - Photography by Zivanai Matangi

Kaldi Makutike - Photography by Zivanai Matangi

South African Focus - Take Me Somewhere Festival 2023
As a key part of the Take Me Somewhere festival we were thrilled to be able to present a South African focus, thanks to support from the British Council. “'The Centre of Somewhere' project provided an invaluable opportunity to the participating artists, allowing them the possibility of developing and furthering their thinking and practice through a range of engagements with other artists both at home and abroad. The Centre for the Less Good Idea is pleased to have partnered with Take Me Somewhere to enable these explorations, discussions and the forging of new international connections for the artists involved.” The Centre of The Less Good Idea.

• Goldendean with Soft Vxnxs, Breathe and Big Fat Light Merqueer

• Desire Marea

• Mamela Nyamza with Black Privilege

• Kieron Jira who performed as ArtAfriak with The Rise

(Images below from left to right - Goldendean - Breathe © Brian Hartley, Desire Marea © Tiu Makkonen, Mamela Nyamza - Black Privilege © Brian Hartley, Kieron Jira performing as ArtAfriak - The Rise - © Brian Hartley)

More about the project

The Centre of Somewhere: Johannesburg / Glasgow, was an embedded, connective residency collaborative project between Take Me Somewhere and The Centre For The Less Good Idea (Johannesburg, South Africa) designed to explore new ways of doing, making, connecting, befriending and building international networks.

From Sept 2022- March 2023, this major international exchange supported four performance makers, two from Glasgow and two from Johannesburg, to create and innovate across cities. With the support of The Centre and TMS they explored new ways to build relationships for their practice, connecting with artists, audiences and communities in an embedded approach. Our Digital Cohort brought the group together online to connect, reflect and share approaches. 

The Centre Of Somewhere involved spending time in both locations, the artists developed their creative projects, met local artists, experienced the cities and their surroundings, shared their practice and created new and exciting long-term connections, laying fertile ground for their projects’ future life.

In addition, following the residency exchange, Take Me Somewhere presented a programme of works by South African artists in their international performance Festival; including Mamela Nyamza, Goldendean, Desire Marera & Kieron Jina.

The Centre of Somewhere: Johannesburg / Glasgow is funded by the British Council’s International Collaboration Grants, designed to support UK and overseas organisations to collaborate on international arts projects. Read more about this project here.

PACBI Pledge

As an organisation which seeks to bring Scottish artists into dialogue with the rest of the world, we cannot ignore the ongoing Genocide against the Palestinian people from the Israeli State. In addition to calling for an immediate ceasefire, Take Me Somewhere pledges support for the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

What is PACBI?

“The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) was initiated in 2004 to contribute to the struggle for Palestinian freedom, justice and equality. It advocates for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions for their deep and persistent complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights that are stipulated in international law.” Further detail can be found here: www.bdsmovement.net/pacbi/cultural-boycott-guidelines

In action for Take Me Somewhere this looks like:
- Not platforming or participating in performance projects, residencies & arts/academic exchanges which are in receipt of funding from the Israeli Government, complicit Israeli institutions or Israeli Embassy touring funding.
- Not programming or participating in performance projects, residencies & arts/academic exchanges which serve to normalise and/or whitewash the oppression of the Israeli State, or present a 'two-sides' narrative that assumes that both colonisers and colonised are equally responsible for “conflict”.
- Reviewing in detail the guidelines laid out in the PACBI Guidelines for the International Cultural Boycott of Israel & writing them into our policies.

Wider to PACBI, TMS will also share fundraisers, events & protests related to ending the genocide on our social media platforms.
The cultural boycott of Israel will continue until Israel is in compliance with the basic demands outlined in the 2005 BDS Call.
We want to acknowledge our appreciation & respect for the incredible labour undertaken by Art Workers For Palestine Scotland in holding the Scottish arts sector to account whilst providing essential resources & research to rally support for Palestine in Scotland.

Take Me Somewhere is pleased to announce a new exciting partnership with Mophradat as part of the Mophradat Artists Fellowship, awarded to Amr Alsirawan.

Amr will join Take me Somewhere from Jan - April 2024;  supporting the organisation as we begin 2024 with the initiation of several artist development projects through Studio Somewhere. 

The 2024 Mophradat Artists Fellowship is an assistantship program for young artists and curators to work with  more experienced professionals or an established institution. The aim of the Fellowship is for younger artists and curators from the Arab world to be able to learn through a hands-on assistantship, learning more about the professional art making world through close exchange with their hosts to get to know their practice and be introduced to skills, networks, resources, and communities in their field. The fellowships follow a clear job description and schedule provided by the host, who also commits to engaging in a conversation with the fellow/s about their practices. The fellows are provided with a grant from Mophradat to support the fellowship period.

ABOUT AMR

Amr is an artist and a creator of QIWA events in Scotland. Amr first came to the UK as a Syrian refugee fleeing persecution from his native home. He arrived here with the hope of being able to express his authentic self freely without fear for his own safety. Amr is a student at Edinburgh College studying ‘Contemporary Art Practice’ specialising in sculpting and wearable arts. Amr has been working as an organiser for diverse cabaret shows and culturally vibrant club nights. Under Amr's vision and direction, these have served as one of the very few safe spaces for people of colour in Scotland. He's interested in artists presenting their culture with a contemporary twist and really admires when the artist showcases their life struggle, transferring their feelings and emotions to the audience.

Follow Amr on Instagram

ABOUT MOPHRADAT

Mophradat creates opportunities for artists from the Arab world through an inventive approach to funding, commissioning, collaborating, and gathering. Their  way of working is imaginative and ambitious, inclusive and hospitable. Mophradat recognize the Arab world as a loosely-defined geography that is called home by people of diverse ethnicities, gender identities, religions, ideologies, and languages. The name Mophradat is an (eccentric) transliteration of the Arabic word meaning vocabulary. The  name speaks to the uniqueness of individual elements in a collective, but also to the way in which, brought together, they generate shared meanings and understandings. Mophradat are registered as an international nonprofit association in Belgium. Mophradat values are here.

Find out more about Mophradat on their website

Follow Mophradat on Instagram

Diverse Critics - Elspeth Wilson - reviewing 'Manual'

Diverse Critics is a talent development programme for disabled and/or Black and people of colour arts writers delivered in partnership between Disability Arts Online and The Skinny and supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland. Over the last eight months, eight aspiring writers based in Scotland have been supported with a bursary, training, mentoring and publishing opportunities. Take Me Somewhere have partnered with Disability Arts Online to offer further bursaries to a selection of the cohort to attend and review works as part of this year’s festival.

Christopher Willes and Adam Kinner MANUAL: a sensorial experience with public space

Christopher Willes and Adam Kinner’s MANUAL is a one-on-one performance that turns a public library into a space of sensory encounter and heightened awareness. Staged covertly during public hours, participants arrive on site with instructions to meet a guide who leads them silently through a series of subtle events, following written notes and immersive audio in headphones. Elspeth Wilson recounts the experience at Glasgow’s Mitchell Library as part of Take Me Somewhere Festival.

I am being invited to take ten deep breaths with my eyes closed. It’s the first time I’ve paused all day and as I do, something inside of me untenses.

I’ve been guided along a cool, echoing marble corridor in the Mitchell Library by a volunteer who points out that sometimes, if you listen carefully, the motorway outside can sound like a roaring river. Finding the beauty in a controversial piece of infrastructure that has caused pain and destroyed Glaswegian neighbourhoods is a sign of what’s to come in the next forty-five minutes as I’m taken on a one-on-one performance which invites reassessment and rethinking.

Once I’ve breathed in the chill air, I open my eyes and am greeted by a different person who communicates with me via handwriting in a tiny notebook. I am told that we will be going on a walk and I follow my guide through huge stacks of books, past desks with chunky computers and lobbies with tired-looking industrial carpets. We stop at a kind of mezzanine area where we can look down to the floor below where people are talking with advisors at a Citizens’ Advice Bureau.

Via the notebook, I’m invited to listen together to the sounds around us – at first those that are closer and then those further away. When I reopened my eyes at the start of the performance, it already felt like something had shifted, that I’d transitioned into a different way of being in the library, and this invitation compounds my sense of slipping into a new relationship with the space. As someone with noise sensitivity, I often feel like I’m in a battle with noise, viewing it as a kind of ‘pollution’. But when my sole goal is to listen and tune in, I find that the coughing, typing, tapping and page-turning around me becomes surprisingly soothing – almost like the white noise I usually use to survive in loud situations.

I am a part of MANUAL, a performance created by Christopher Willes and Adam Kinner, with dramaturgy by Hanna Sybille Müller, and programmed as part of Take Me Somewhere festival. Performed at libraries around the world by a host of performers, the work encourages a deeper sensorial experience with public space than is often afforded to us in busy, harried lives – especially when public space is increasingly under threat from budget cuts and ideological opponents.

The Mitchell Library is a cavernous, impressive building with a huge array of public services and different ways of enjoying public space housed inside. In a huge, high-ceilinged room, my guide takes me to a desk and uses various books they have found in the library to create a new book and tell a collaged, wordless story. Using a kind of sculpture created from books, they open them at pages marked with plain paper to show me a series of images that starts with a focus on hands, expanding to full bodies then natural landscapes then rock concerts. At the same time, I listen to a recording of sounds from this same room that the performer previously made, elevating the soundscape of the everyday to something worthy of repetition.

The piece culminates in a quiet corner with a shared reading of a text the performer has selected. We take a turn to read a line each and it is surprising to hear their voice for the first time – an interesting play on the convention of no talking in libraries. The performer has also picked an image of blurry amorphous white shapes and, upon their instruction, we take it in turns to pick out things we can see and name them. It is an exercise that broadens ways of seeing as it goes on, a microcosm of the effect of the whole performance.

As MANUAL ends, I am left, slightly disoriented, in an unfamiliar part of the library next to a cart where returned books represent a jigsaw of interests – post-punk, the Thames, streams. When I have to ask a member of staff for directions, I find it difficult to speak. MANUAL is true to its name – I’ve felt guided in a gentle manner that paid attention to accessibility requirements. Without my guide I feel a little lost.

On my own, the enormity of the beauty of libraries combined with their increasingly precarious existence feels overwhelming. MANUAL is a performance with tranquillity and deep emotion at its heart but an implicit anger too – public spaces are (at best) deliberately and chronically underfunded in this country. I desperately don’t want MANUAL to be a swansong but rather a call to community and protection.

Reproduced with kind permission of Disability Arts Online
Originally published 17 November 2023.

Main photo © David Wong.

Diverse Critics is a talent development programme for disabled and/or Black and people of colour arts writers delivered in partnership between Disability Arts Online and The Skinny and supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland. Over the last eight months, eight aspiring writers based in Scotland have been supported with a bursary, training, mentoring and publishing opportunities. Take Me Somewhere have partnered with Disability Arts Online to offer further bursaries to a selection of the cohort to attend and review works as part of this year’s festival.

About the writer

Elspeth Wilson is a writer and poet who is interested in exploring the limitations and possibilities of the body through writing, as well as writing about joy and happiness from a marginalised perspective. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Too Hot to Sleep, was published by Bent Key Publishing in April 2023. Her creative work on embodiment and accessibility has been supported by Creative Scotland, Arts Council England and the Royal Society of Literature.

Insta @elspethwrites
Twitter @elspethwriter

Diverse Critics - Zinzi Buchanan reviewing 'Transmission: Sissy TV'

Diverse Critics is a talent development programme for disabled and/or Black and people of colour arts writers delivered in partnership between Disability Arts Online and The Skinny and supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland. Over the last eight months, eight aspiring writers based in Scotland have been supported with a bursary, training, mentoring and publishing opportunities. Take Me Somewhere have partnered with Disability Arts Online to offer further bursaries to a selection of the cohort to attend and review works as part of this year’s festival.

Nando Messias’ TransMission: Sissy TV is a reminder to live beautifully

To mark Trans Awareness week 2023, Zinzi Buchanan reflects on Nando Messias’ TransMission: Sissy TV, a performance exploring their personal and artistic archive, accumulated over two decades of creating work. Messias uses their archive as a framework to discuss larger issues such as transphobia, the pathologisation of trans bodies and identities, trans exclusion, social violence and visibility. It was performed as part of Take Me Somewhere Festival in Glasgow in October.

Nando Messias invites us into the theatre, which they have turned into their closet, to see, touch, smell and hear their personal archive. Through re-visiting past performances they tell of the experiences that brought them to the spotlight of performance and the importance of voicing and remembering Trans histories in an intimate way today.

An archive is often thought to be related to 2D materials such as text and images, but can also be embodied, as Messias shows by bringing not just beautiful clothing in their extensive wardrobe, but their body, voice, memory and stories. For one hour they open up the archive using multiple items of clothing that came into their life through decades of making performances.

Messias had me arriving into my own body as they stepped slowly into a pair of sparkly red knickers in silence. There is a sense of watching something too private and Messias seems to know this and makes a joke to show that they are at ease with themself. They stand in the knickers and matching red shoes and speak. Messias goes back in time to when they were making a work about Brazil, their home country, also the most deadly nation for Trans people. In the time spent making the piece twelve Trans people were killed in Brazil and Messias brought a pair of underwear for each. Now they are lined up on a long cardboard box – a river of red lace and glitter overlapping each other. I think of the Trans friends lost in my own lifetime and wonder how they could gather now.

Another story of violence hit closer to home – in the UK. In the theatre, Messias walks towards a baby blue gown hung on a coat hanger with a matching feather boa draped over it’s unfilled shoulders. Messias bought this dress and hired a marching band and returned to the scene of an attack they experienced. They needed years of critical distance before making that full-volume, glamorous performance, which sits alongside the attack in the archive.

Messias seems to weave time together, showing how remembering is essential for finding beauty in living, despite horror. They look around and say “we [Trans people] always had a voice and this is what it sounds like” and then sings. We hear them sing over and over throughout the show, just like they returned to performance over the past two decades, even if years of retreat were needed – they made it back. There is a fullness to Messias’ voice, just as there is to their life and the events, the joy and the grief, that made this archive.

The items themselves are beautiful to look at, but Messias’ archive carries a beauty beyond colour and detail. The framing of Messias’ own experience (and broader Trans experience) is done with such humility and vulnerability, that I have no doubt they could’ve brought a bag of grey and blue joggers and still felt its beauty. Instead, Messias brought rows of the most fabulous shoes, home-made hair-earrings, a Cinderella dress and so much more.

These acted like amplifiers, bringing them shrieks of joy as they changed shoes or stood tall, claiming to feel safe, despite wearing undies that barely cover anything. Messias tells us they don’t want to hide away. We feel their aliveness in their performance and how it is not separate from being alive in everyday life. Each of these past performances still lives within Messias. They are very present, sensing change: The archive won’t be the same when you leave as when the evening began, they promise.

The lights are low and Messias sits centre stage. We can feel that our time together is winding down. Messias sets fire to one of the hair-earrings that they made during lockdown when their hair was falling out and they thought they were dying. Like in every other moment of her archive, Messias harnesses fear and creates beauty out of it. We sit together in a kind of séance,  “Allow my body to meet your body through your nostrils,” Messias says.

Because we have come to trust Messias through sharing their life, we open our nostrils despite the anticipation of the horrific smell of burning hair. ‘We are not separate’ seems to be the message here. You can close your senses to my body, you can try to shut out my existence, but I am not going anywhere. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” Messias remarks. As their DNA lifts into the air, we are left with the residue of this beautiful Trans archive: song, pain, laughter, a gift, a request for help, the delight at finding a vegan marshmallow in a tiny handbag, a loud sound and the smell of burning hair.

Reproduced with kind permission of Disability Arts Online
This review was first published 16 November 2023

Main photo © Holly Revell

About the writer

Zinzi Buchanan is an artist working with dance, performance, facilitation and writing. Their practise is improvisational and intuitive in nature and they often share on difficult topics whilst finding playfulness in the potential of our alive bodies. They recently facilitated an Acupuncture Clinic at Gropius Bau Berlin, curated by SERAFINE1369/Jamila Johnson-Small and in 2021 focused on creating work for chronically ill people including a 90 minute sonic-performance called SICK DREAMS. Zinzi has been a facilitator at Ponderosa Dance Festival for many years and loves to creatively hold space for others. Their writing has been published by Disability Arts Online, Coven Berlin and The Skinny.

Diverse Critics - Maya Rose Edwards reviewing The Present Is Not Enough

Diverse Critics is a talent development programme for disabled and/or Black and people of colour arts writers delivered in partnership between Disability Arts Online and The Skinny and supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland. Over the last eight months, eight aspiring writers based in Scotland have been supported with a bursary, training, mentoring and publishing opportunities. Take Me Somewhere have partnered with Disability Arts Online to offer further bursaries to a selection of the cohort to attend and review works as part of this year’s festival.

The Present Is Not Enough at CCA, Glasgow

Take Me Somewhere festival presents a celebration of queer desire which will get pulses racing

Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street on Saturday night is a mass of stag dos, Tesco booze runs and Freshers’ flu. Arriving at the CCA is a sigh of relief. There’s an admittedly queer atmosphere and a shared anticipation that this one might truly be for us. 

The Present Is Not Enough by Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo is a 60-minute performance with live sound score commissioned for Take Me Somewhere alternative performance festival. Italy-based Calderoni is a well-recognised actress, performer and author who has starred in films such as Moonbird (2022) by Ra Di Martino. Caleo is a queer-feminist activist, researcher and dramaturg, collaborating with theatre companies and directors across Europe. The pair met in 2012 and commenced their shared practice through residencies, research ateliers and performances. The Present Is Not Enough’s accompanying poetic text speaks of bodies, wildness and a yearning for futures. A nod to cruising (the practice of fleeting sex, often between gay men and more than often in semi-public spaces) as a ‘relational queer practice’ yet unseen by lesbian women.

Akin to this, as an audience we anonymously and eagerly enter this arranged meeting in public space. As the door is closed behind us the potential energy in the room is thick. Those seated on the floor arrange their knees at a polite distance as a single performer, nude from the waist down, lifts their foot to their mouth and seductively begins to kiss it. 

The live electronic score commences as five more semi-nude bodies enter. One, bent over arse-first with their pants round their knees. They bask together under the white stage lights like big cats. This unexpected group of high school ‘untouchables’ have us right where they want us. Gender non-conforming bodies of both old and young meet each of us by eye, and by meet, I mean fuck. There’s a feline purr on the score that makes me think of lions again, a pride. I find myself in moments of skip-a-beat eye contact with each of them, flushed and frozen by the interaction. Tongues flick and lashes wink and I can’t be the only one absolutely transfixed by it all. I look around to see other audience members grinning violently in return or staring hard at the floor, tips of their ears burnt red. 

The set is simple, and it needs to be. Each holding a plastic bag of a different colour, a potential nod to Hal Fischers’ Gay Semiotics, the new back pocket handkerchief. Corrugated cardboard walls are re-arranged, cutting scenes between public and private. They play the audience against one another, allowing some of us to peep and others to crane our necks voyeuristically. At one point, they become urinal stalls, alluding to the historical cruising of public toilets or ‘tearooms’, the principal underground space for queer sexual encounters which now instil fear in similarly criminalised trans bodies. Tense spaces of connection and danger. In this scene, I can feel them all. 

The non-narrative diaries of artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz punctuate. He speaks of the city, of suicide, and heartache as these vibrant deviant bodies find new ways to move together. Sometimes, I wish we spoke about queer history without the mention of lives lost, but Calderoni and Caleo have managed to marry collective grief with just the right glimpse of utopia. 

The choreographed encounters are stimulating but never boorish, filled with references to the more-than-human, animalistic desire often used to describe queer sexuality. Performers drop their pants to their ankles and lift their shirts to cover their faces, blindly shuffling and whistling toward one another like birds in a mating ritual. Exposed, unsteady and faceless, they land arse to arse in a loud smacking kiss. Others attempt to contort themselves together with the wrong legs through one another’s jeans. These are the imperfections of encounters; the first scenes cut from sex films presented as the final messy product. It’s pure and beautiful in its absolution. 

As an audience, we soften and submit to the collective post-coital euphoria. Bent knees of those seated relax to kiss their neighbours', as we too become a connected body. The cardboard walls are torn down during a final mournful song, and we’re back to our Saturday night in Glasgow. There was a feeling created together in that room, one of shared desires and shimmering freedom. We file out after the applause, giddy with our belongings in our arms as if leaving a one-night stand. This work is a radical triumph, not a dry seat left in the house.

Kindly reproduced with permission of The Skinny
Originally published 3 November 2023
Main Banner - © Roberta Segata, courtesy Centrale Fies

About the writer

Maya Rose Edwards is a participatory artist working with public space and people, using hunter-gatherer tactics to inform poetics, placemaking and people/object relations through site-specific intervention. They have worked in participatory settings for 4+ years creating ambitious public artworks with communities, and across diverse consultancy roles for arts organisations to increase creative access. They are the recipient of the RSA New Contemporaries Selection 2023 for which they received the Chalmers Award, Creative Scotland Youth Arts Bursary 2022, Steven Palmer Travel Research Bursary 2023, and are a member of the 2023/24 cohort of The School of the Damned. 

 @mre_arts 

https://mayaroseedwards.com/

Diverse Critics - Natasha Thembiso Ruwona reviewing Proxy 2.2 by NXSA

Diverse Critics is a talent development programme for disabled and/or Black and people of colour arts writers delivered in partnership between Disability Arts Online and The Skinny and supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland. Over the last eight months, eight aspiring writers based in Scotland have been supported with a bursary, training, mentoring and publishing opportunities. Take Me Somewhere have partnered with Disability Arts Online to offer further bursaries to a selection of the cohort to attend and review works as part of this year’s festival.

Proxy 2.2 by NXSA: holding space for solidarity

Originally intended as a performance that sought to interrogate the ‘invisibilised systems of enduring colonisation’, proxy 2.2 by NXSA at Take Me Somewhere Festival in Glasgow was reimagined as a gathering which invited the audience to come together in solidarity in response to the current atrocities in Gaza.

NXSA began the gathering by communicating their reasons for the change, as those ‘invisibilised systems’ previously described were currently very much visible, a product of settler colonialism, inescapable and unfolding before our eyes. This sparked a bodily reaction from the artist – a need to pause – an expression of the deep sadness and rage that so many of us currently feel, which meant that they were unable to continue with their performance as planned.  

Instead, proxy 2.2 brought people together in a time of powerlessness, who were then able to exchange thoughts, reflect or rest. The room was filled with cushions, beanbags, dim blue lighting, and candles – it felt safe, held, yet tense in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Masks were readily available and encouraged, reminding us that COVID is still present, and continues to be dangerous for some of us when gathering together.

We were then given prompts which invited us to form break-out groups where we could make signs for the upcoming protests, share our thoughts and feelings with one another in small groups, or simply be in the space without the pressure to do or say anything, with a reminder that we could leave at any time.

These options were an offering to tune into our own bodies and consider what we might need at the moment, whilst contributing towards small actions in the name of solidarity. I remained on the beanbags with some friends discussing a book one was reading ‘Minor Detail’ (2017) by the Palestinian author Adania Shibli. Solidarity is responsive, it is present in many forms.

The gathering closed with a ‘sonic reflection’ – a 10-minute snippet of the sound work from the original performance of interviews by Palestinians and a particularly powerful poem by Rafeef Ziadah. For me, this was by far the most emotional part of the gathering. As we sat or lay listening to these first-hand experiences of the effects of the war, their voices filled the room, a collective experience of tuning in which brought us fully into the present with one another across time, space and geographies.

As someone who has not attended any protests (I find it challenging to be on my feet for long periods of time, and feel overwhelmed in large crowds), this gathering created a space to come together and show how the different forms of solidarity might be expressed, especially when it can be hard to know what to do. Many artists and art workers have been striking, cancelling events, and donating money from ticket sales to Palestinian charities. Solidarity looks like many things, with each of us navigating our own journeys of how best to show up. proxy 2.2 created space to hold care for ourselves and each other at its forefront.

Reproduced with kind permission of Disability Arts Online

Originally published on 31 October 2023
Main banner image courtesy of the artist

About the writer

Natasha Thembiso Ruwona is a Scottish Zimbabwean moving-image artist, researcher, and curator-programmer-producer based between London and Scotland. She is interested in spatial practice and Afrofuturism as methods of thinking about place across time. Natasha also investigates processes of healing in relation to understanding our environments.

natasharuwona.com

Meet the team - Seán Talbot

We wanted to introduce our team to everyone and we’re starting off this week with a little mini-interview with one of our newest assistant producers - Seán Talbot.

What brought you to work at TMS?

I first moved to Glasgow in 2018 to study Contemporary Performance, and I first came into contact with TMS in 2019 when I attended their festival. Since then I took part in a Graduate Residency last year, and am now interning as an assistant producer with the festival. I am a performance maker and artist, learning more about working as a producer.

What are you currently working on for the festival?

I’m currently doing a lot! I’m assisting in lots of producing jobs, from booking travel and accommodation for our international guests, to managing the TMS Studio Somewhere, our studio space for rent and artist support. I even took a day last week to go to edinburgh to scout some fringe previews for work.  

What are you looking forward to seeing the most at the festival

Carolina Bianchi’s CADELA FORÇA TRILOGY CHAPTER 1: THE BRIDE & THE GOODNIGHT CINDERELLA looks really exciting. This is the kind of big scale international work that we don’t get to see everyday in Glasgow, and to me this is what TMS festival is all about. Exciting, innovative, risk taking live performance. I can’t wait to see it!

Carolina Bianchi’s CADELA FORÇA TRILOGY CHAPTER 1: THE BRIDE & THE GOODNIGHT CINDERELLA - © Christophe Raynaud

What does a typical day look like for you at the moment?

A typical day in the TMS office looks like coming into Tramway, making a large pot of coffee for everyone, then getting stuck into work. Some of the meetings I might take part in are how to make a particular show most accessible for audiences, giving my opinion on a poster mock up, booking several flights for a touring company to come to Scotland, then in the afternoon seeing a sharing by the resident artist in Studio Somewhere. I’ve found every day will be different and that's really exciting.

Where does Take Me Somewhere take you?

Take Me Somewhere takes me to a really rich, caring arts environment, where my voice is heard, exciting things are happening everyday, and everyone having access to brilliant scottish and international arts and performance is possible. Working with Take Me Somewhere is taking me on a journey which will hopefully go well beyond my six-month intern placement here, but on a lifelong journey in this industry.