Friday 22nd April, 7:00-9:30pm

Download Sowing Seeds Handout here.pdf

'Sowing Seeds' is a celebration commemorating Earth Day as part of Shenece Oretha's 'Ah So It Go, Ah No So It Go, Go So!' listening Space at Cubitt Gallery. Shenece invites poets, writers and performers to join her and extend her meditation on belonging, land, growing and grounding through poetry, oral traditions, performance and embodied knowing in tribute to Caribbean growers and literary figures. 

Derica (duh-REE-kah) Shields is a writer from South London. Her work has appeared in Frieze, Flash Art, and Girls Like Us, and she has received commissions from Turf Projects, Cell Project Space, and Wysing Arts Centre. She is a former Contributing Editor at the New Inquiry and former Story Editor at Rookie. In 2021, A Heavy Nonpresence, her oral history project on Black Londoners’ accounts of the British welfare state, was published by Triple Canopy. Derica is currently working on Bad Practice, a book about the potentials of Black failure, forthcoming from Book Works.

 

Christopher Kirubi/Dove is a London based poet and artist.

 

Ffion Campbell-Davies is a multidisciplinary artist and Associate Director of House Of Absolute. Born and raised in Wales, an advocate for Welsh speaking women of mixed heritage, she completed her degree in dance at The California Institute of the Arts and London Contemporary Dance School. As a movement director and choreographer, her work can be seen in adverts for Nurofen and she has presented numerous stageworks for Richmix, The Place, Shoreditch Town Hall, The Albany, Bernie Grants, The RSA and The Now Gallery and more. A mesmerising mover and multi-talented sound producer, she has travelled globally and worked with Zahhak, a Persian opera directed by Hossein Hadisi, Dam Van Hyunh, Vietnamese-led company, Korean arts fest Modafe with director  and choreographers Frankie Johnson, Kyoung Shin-Kim & Kim Hyung-Nam and produced sound score for many theatre and live works. Ffion works collaboratively and is additionally developing solo-based work with disciplines such as voice, text and poetry to transmit her visual and digital art. She draws from Contemporary, Hip hop and Krump, indigenous dance forms of femininity and deity embodiment, integrating her influences of holistic therapy and martial arts. Her work spans across music and film production, performative experimental art and exhibitionism. In her work she explores, humanitarian politics through psychoanalysis, body language and spirituality. Interested in the contexts of race, gender, culture & identity, she creates through the influences of ritual, expressing various aspects of the human experience. Ffion continually bridges spaces of ancestral empowerment locally and internationally.

Imani Mason Jordan (fka Robinson) is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor and curator. Their research-led practice combines live art and performance, oration, collaboration, poetry and critical theory, exploring themes of black geographies, the afterlives of transatlantic slavery, abolition, radical resistance and the politics of safety. Recent performances include ATLANTIC RAILTON: LIVE with Ain Bailey at Serpentine Pavilion (2021); TREAD/MILL-WIP at Somerset House Studios (2021) & WELCOME NOTE (Quantum Ghost) with Libita Sibungu (various iterations 2018-2021). Alongside Rabz Lansiquot, Imani is also one half of the artistic and curatorial collaboration Languid Hands, who are Curatorial Fellows at Cubitt Artists, Angel, until Spring 2022, presenting work by R.I.P. Germain, Ajamu X, Camara Taylor & Shenece Oretha. In 2021, Languid Hands curated the LIVE programme for Frieze London, presenting newly commissioned performances by Rebecca Bellantoni, Ebun Sodipo & Ashley Holmes as part of their programme No Real Closure.



Shenece Oretha is a London based multidisciplinary artist sounding out the voice and sound’s mobilising potential. Through installation, performance, print, sculpture, sound, workshops and text she amplifies and celebrates listening and sound as an embodied and collective practice. Her work is attentive to not just the music, but the musicality of Black oral traditions, ceremony, spiritual practice and literature together with the intimate emotional, physical and communal resonance they generate. Her solo exhibitions include at/Tribute, Institute Of Contemporary Art, London (2022), Called to Respond, Cell Project Space, London, (2020), TESTING GROUNDS, Cafe OTO Project Space, London, (2019). Group exhibitions include, SURVEY II, G39, Cardiff, Jerwood Arts, London and Site Gallery, Sheffield (2021-22), Cinders, Sinuous and Supple, Les Urbaines, Lausanne, Switzerland  (2019), and PRAISE N PAY IT/ PULL UP, COME INTO THE RISE, South London Gallery, London, (2018). Shenece was recently commissioned to make a new work in response to the sound archive at the British Library, Possibilities, Note On Play (2021). 



Ah So It Go, Ah No So It Go, Go So! is the final part of Languid Hands’ Cubitt Curatorial Fellowship Programme, No Real Closure, which has seen the duo curate four solo commissions from UK- based Black artists of Caribbean descent: R.I.P. Germain, Ajamu, Camara Taylor and Shenece Oretha, as well as the LIVE programme for Frieze London 2021, with new performances by Rebecca Bellantoni, Ebun Sodipo and Ashley Holmes, and the group screening programme REEL: AXIS, NOT POLES with Che Applewhaite, Kondo Heller, S*an D. Henry Smith, Dita Hashi and Kadeem Oak. 

No Real Closure is a platform for experimentation and development of black artistic practice across exhibitions, moving image, text, performance and public programming. Absent is the disproportionate emphasis on surface-level survey style programmes and representational focus: when we gather, we do so to manifest collaboration, exchange, dialogue, relationships – a sum greater than its individual parts.

Cubitt is an artist run cooperative based in Islington, London. Founded by a group of artists in 1991, Cubitt consists of a non-profit gallery, education programme and 32 artist studios. The Cubitt Curatorial Fellowship is a unique opportunity for research and curatorial experimentation in the field of visual arts, based on an 18-month residency, the only such scheme in the UK and one of very few in the world. Since its inception in 2000, it has pioneered an individual model and developed into a major platform for curatorial development, leading Cubitt’s reputation as an experimental, artist-led institution for nurturing, showcasing and reimagining emerging practice.

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