Rehearsals (for a world we could live in): Programme Launch Event

Join us for a launch event for Radar's new programme.

Rehearsals (for a world we could live in) explores practices of world building, or worlding, which enact and perform more just and liveable worlds, alongside the concept of the rehearsal, both in terms of a slow and committed practice of learning and working-towards, and also in reference to the concept of rehearsal in a Black feminist liberationist lineage: for example how Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes abolition, as life in rehearsal.

The Rehearsals programme will commission a series of artists whose work imagines new worlds or ways of living, from more equitable healthcare systems, to climate solidarity networks, to embodied forms of justice. This programme connects to research happening across Loughborough University, from the Health Humanities research group, to the Institute for Advanced Studies, to researchers in English, Sociology, Politics, Architecture and more.

For this discussion, in addition to hearing from two of the artists who will work with Radar as part of this programme, Dani Admiss & Luiza Prado, we are delighted to host invited guest speakers Jemma Desai, Amahra Spence and Hannah Wallis, whose distinct practices each model more liveable worlds: from life-affirming infrastructures, to accessible futures, to decolonial and abolitionist scholarship and praxis.

Please note that this is a hybrid event. Please select an 'in person ticket' if you wish to attend the event on the Loughborough University campus or an 'Online ticket' if you wish to join us via Zoom. Login details will be sent by email to online attendees a few days before the event.

This event will be live captioned.

International House has step-free access into the building.

If you have any access requirements or anything you would like us to be aware of when running the event, please let us know via the booking form or email [email protected] in advance of booking and we will do our best to accommodate them.

Dr Dani Admiss is an artist, curator and educator. Her work is a journey of learning to live well with others within limits. She champions community-based learning and uses her role of ‘curator’ as a shared space for collective inquiry, story building and meaning making, often working with a coalition of agitators, dream weavers, growers and caregivers. Together, they have created a holistic decarbonisation plan for art workers (Stanley Picker Gallery), designed immersive game-environments that unwittingly extract data in exchange for public services (Furtherfield), formed a Bill of More-Than-Human Rights (Porto Design Festival), and set up an alternative ethics committee for eco and social conservation (MAAT, Lisbon). Under the name of the Sunlight Liberation Network, she is currently creating an ethical learning program for ‘greener’ and fairer art practices (Arts Catalyst) and running a slow “companion-planting” working group (Creative Scotland) exploring regenerative cultures and alternative configurations of working in the arts.

Admiss has created numerous exhibitions, conferences, workshops, and edited books, in the UK, the EU and internationally. She was an Artangel Making Time resident (2023) and a Stanley Picker Fellow (2020). Her PhD is in Curatorial Practice and World-Making with an AHRC grant, and she is an advisor on the editorial board of ‘Digital Materialities and Sustainable Futures’ Book series, Emerald Press.

Jemma Desai is a cultural worker across film, visual arts and performance and a somatic facilitator working with individuals and groups. She is preoccupied by the discrepancy between the bonds of love that hold us together and the attachments we form around and within cultural production. These concerns drive her work which attempts a committed engagement with decolonial and abolitionist scholarship and praxis and through this, considers the gap between intention and practice in imagining, making and circulating culture.

Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist, writer and scholar. Her work moves between installation and herbalist practices, using performance and ritual as a way of invitation and activation for audiences. Her practice explores relations and knowledge between plants, political infrastructures, and technology, and questions what structures and processes are needed for collective concerns of environmental care and reproductive justice. She holds a PhD from the University of the Arts Berlin, and an MA from the University of the Arts Bremen.

Her ongoing artistic research project, “Un/Earthings and Moon Landings” narrates, through a series of artworks, the extinction and later reappearance of an ancient contraceptive, aphrodisiac and spice called silphium. She has exhibited and performed work at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg (MUDAM), the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Museum Ostwall (Dortmund), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum (Cologne), the National Museum of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Savvy Contemporary, Arebyte Gallery, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Kampnagel, among others. She is currently based in Berlin.

Amahra Spence is the founding director of MAIA a Black-led cultural organisation which engages culture as an imagination and organising strategy for liberation. MAIA is in the process of incubating a new organisation, designed to steward land out of the private speculation market, into reparative, dignifying community stewardship in perpetuity. Through this platform, they are working to build infrastructures that grow the personal, structural and sustained capacities in support of thriving Black life and its interdependencies. Amahra is an artist, curator, convener, strategist, researcher, systems designer and spatial practitioner.

Hannah Wallis is an artist, curator and d/Deaf activist. Her work explores the nuances of communication and sensory deprivation, sitting at the intersection of access, equity and embodied transformation. Hannah currently works as co-programme director at Grand Union, Birmingham alongside access consultation work. Previously she worked with Nottingham Contemporary and Wysing Arts Centre. She has worked with Aural Diversity, Deafroots, the Victoria & Albert Museum, National Gallery, London, Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam, Site Gallery, Sheffield and Visual Arts South West; is a Trustee for a-n Artists Information Company and Collective Text and sits on the advisory panel for Two Queens, Leicester.

In 2020-2021, Hannah completed a curatorial residency at Wysing Arts Centre as part of Future Curators Network, and now serves as associate advisor to the programme. Between 2021-2024, Hannah co-led Caption-Conscious Ecology (AHRC & Art Fund) and The Art of Captioning research group, funded by British Art Network (Tate and Paul Mellon Centre) with Dr. Sarah Hayden. As Dyad Creative with artist Théodora Lecrinier between 2014-2019, and supported by organisations including a-n, East Street Arts, National Centre for Writing, Kettle’s Yard, and Arts Council England, Hannah has previously led residency programmes and learning projects, developed interactive commissions and curatorial research, as well as managing several temporary artist-led spaces.

Please note that photography and/or filming will be taking place at this event. If you do not consent to your photograph being taken/being filmed and this being used by Radar/LU Arts and Loughborough University for publicity purposes, then please alert the photographer/videographer at the event.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Institute of Advanced Studies, International House, Loughborough University, United Kingdom