Take Me To Montreal
Take Me To Glasgow

Twinned Residencies 2022

In 2022, Take Me Somewhere & LA SERRE( Montreal) collaborated on 4 international Twinned Residencies, as part of the TMS Studio Somewhere artist development strand.

Having collaborated for several years, the Twinned Residencies were a way to maintain international artistic connections and develop creative friendships when physical travel was not possible during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Two artists from Glasgow, PAIX and Anya Sirina, undertook a residency at Studio Somewhere and two artists from Montreal, Kama La Mackarel and Elena Stoodley, were provided with a residency at La Serre. Each artist selected a ‘Host’ from their twinned city, who met them online to act as a creative sounding board, and remotely introduce the artist to a local artistic community. These residencies formed part of Take Me Somewhere’s international artistic development programme, aiming to create the best possible conditions for radical performance to be made in Scotland, a process deeply rooted in international exchange.

ABOUT LA SERRE

LA SERRE is the organisation that produces and curates the OFFTA festival. LA SERRE is an incubator for the improvement of the conditions under which emerging artists carry out their work in live art. It accompanies them in the expansion of their work, from the creation process to encounters with the public. It helps artists develop their autonomy, organisational maturity and artistic independence. LA SERRE acts as an activator of collaborations between artists and local, national and international partners, as well as artists from various artistic disciplines and other areas.
https://laserre.ca/en

TWINNED RESIDENCY ARTISTS 2022:

Anya Sirina is a performance artist and choreographer based in Glasgow. In her work, Anya saturates movements with meaning through the use of repetition to create an atmosphere of flux wherein actions may seem violent, sensual and playful all at once. In her choreographic work, Anya creates movement compositions that are driven by conceptual and visual narratives of transformation to engross the audience in liminal space.

Whilst on residency, Anya worked with invited sound-artist Claude Nouk on ideas for a new performance for a gallery setting. She envisioned the work as a collection of tableaux vivants and durational installations animated through movement, juxtaposing stillness and silence with intense movement and sound. Anya used the residency to begin researching and creating ritualistic actions that imbued bodies with excessive libidinal charge, choreographing figures and staging objects to render intimate portraits that are ephemeral yet violent.

theworkroom.org.uk/members/anya-sirina

Gillian Katungi is a vocalist and performer who makes work under the persona Paix. Alongside leading her own projects, she collaborates with a range of national and international artists to develop and deliver recorded and live performance. Her work experiments with multiple forms of expression and she enjoys moving in the space between established art forms. The power in her practice is influenced by the personal – self-exploration, love, the diasporic experience, oral storytelling traditions, healing, the metaphysical, memory, her ancestral heritage, and the black archive.

In the sense of re-imagining her artistic process is often centred around playful exploration without judgement and in creating space for what can and does emerge and flourish in safe and healing spaces that centre black intersectional experiences. Recently she has been exploring 'space' in all its manifestations as an element of healing and our connection to environment, movement and finding love and home with and in.     

www.paix-music.com

Elena Stoodley is a singer, author, songwriter and sound designer half of the time, the remaining being spent in community organising. Born in Tio'tia:ke, Montreal, she often blends her passion for social justice and black liberation with her art practises. She studied Creative Writing and Electroacoustic music and performed her music internationally, including in Cameroon and in the Republic of Congo. She sometimes gives workshops or consults on topics of anti oppressive work practises and intersectional inclusion. Her most recent sound design work was shown in the plays, The Mountaintop, the Rootless tree, Manman LaMer, Black Out (nominated for outstanding sound design for the META’s - Montreal English Theatre Awards and currently working on the annual recap Chécké2021

https://www.elenastoodley.net
@elle_stoodley

Kama La Mackerel is an award-winning Mauritian-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, educator, writer, curator and literary translator. Kama’s work is grounded in the exploration of justice, love, healing, decoloniality, hybridity, cosmopolitanism, ancestral healing and self- and collective-empowerment. 

They are the author ZOM-FAM (Metonymy Press) which was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, a Globe and Mail Best Debut, and was a finalist for the QWF Concordia University First Book Award and the Writers' Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize. World Literature Today called ZOM-FAM “a milestone in Mauritian literature." 

In 2021, Kama was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Joseph S. Stauffer Prize for emerging and mid-career artists in Visual Arts

www.lamackerel.net 
@KamaLaMackerel

CREDITS

The Twinned Residencies are funded by the British Council’s Quebec-UK Connections programme.