"Performance as Protest" (15 minutes, 2021) is a documentary style art film that features six queer Black creatives commissioned by Queering Space with support from the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research.
The artists featured are: Jay Bernard, Tanaka Fuego, Niquelle Latouche, Peter 'Repeat Beat' Poet, PJ Samuels, Lalah Simone Springer.
"Performance as Protest" creatively documents and expands on these artists' powerful intervention at the People's Protest in Newington Green, East London, in August 2020. Organised by Queering Space, the performances were a contribution to the Black Lives Matter protests that took place throughout 2020. Four artists, including three poets, and one dancer, performed live at the People's Protest. Also, audio recordings of an additional two artists were broadcast, holding space for the voices who could not be present, and asking the question: What does it mean to protest for Black lives in the midst of a global pandemic that disproportionately targets Black communities?
Video by April Walker and Tierney Walker.
Sound by Rob Major.
Special thanks to People's Protest & HWK.
Founded in 2018 in London, Queering Space is a critical and anti-racist collaborative initiative operating at the intersections of contemporary art, curation, and research, with a focus on gender, sexuality, migration, and decolonial feminisms.
Participants of the Q&A will be:
Peter deGraft-Johnson is The Repeat Beat Poet, a Hip Hop artist and broadcaster working to capture and extend moments of time, thought, and feeling. Peter has performed across the UK and internationally at venues including the Southbank Centre and Ronnie Scotts in London, and has shared pages and stages with artists like Margaret Atwood, Salena Godden, Roger Robinson, and Thundercat. Peter is the co-founder of the Hip Hop open mic night Pen-Ting, a house emcee with Hip Hop label and jam night Imaginary Millions, creator of the Spoken Word radio show #TheRepeatBeatBroadcast, and host of the multi-award nominated Lunar Poetry Podcast, which is archived in the British Library. Peter has been nominated for a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship, selected by BBC 1Xtra and the Roundhouse for their Poetry Collective programmes, and is an Obsidian Foundation fellow. His poetry has been published by Magma Poetry, Bad Betty Press, and Poetry On The Picket Line, and his debut single This That was released in 2020 to ravereviews, while in 2021 he was an inaugural writer-in-residence at the Library of Africa & The African Diaspora in Accra, Ghana. His debut pamphlet A Testament To Life And Death will be published in February 2022 by Verve Poetry Press.
Insta:@RepeatBeatPoet
Lalah-Simone Springer is a poet and speculative fiction writer from Dagenham, Essex (she/they). Lalah was part of the first Rewrite Academy cohort in 2020-21. During that year, their poetry was long-listed for the Merky New Writers Prize and they were one of the recipients of the Community Engagement 2021 Artist Grant - for artists that reimagine our shared spaces and stimulate social engagement, creative expression and collective empowerment. Lalah has been published in Ink, Sweat and Tears Magazine, Marble Poetry Magazine, on the ANTHEMS podcast and more.
Insta: @lalahsimone
Twitter: @lalah_springer
Nora Laraki is a London based German-Moroccan curator and PhD candidate at the University of Kent. Her interests combine political questions of ethics within curatorial practices. She is the producer for Queering Space, an ongoing dialogue series that carves out queer space and amplifies queer voices.
Nora has produced exhibitions for the European Commission Representation in the UK, the German Historical Institute London and the Goethe Institut. In 2021, Nora ventured into the crypto art world, collaborating with Ethereum London and KnownOrigin on the group show ‘Digital Existence’ an exhibition set up to help the British public understand the new phenomenon of NFTs, a digital art movement taking 2021 by storm. Currently, Nora is working with the Goethe Institut Glasgow on the curation and production of the “Fokus Films from Germany” film festival screening in cinemas in Glasgow in January 2022.
Insta: @noramarieberlin
Twitter: @Nora_Laraki
