Talk HerStories // Shelf Life ROOT-ed, The Laundry Arts and LUMIN

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HerStories // Shelf Life brings together B/black women and non binary people of colour collectives who are involved in creative writing and publishing. Highlighting collaborative and rhizomatic methods of cultural production and dissemination this research project will take a digital peek at the shelf life of collective publishing, from printed matter to digital audiovisual. Through the collective’s reflective responses to chosen womanist/feminist texts from the 1970s – 2020s, we capture lived experiences of self-publishing, creative constellations, and feminist/womanist contemporary publishing. 

Join us on 10th June as the project unfolds in the format of a virtual roundtable discussion with the collectives ROOT-ed, The Laundry Arts and LUMIN. The conversation is led by artist and curator Lauren Craig. 

Our desire lines draw us towards bridging gaps, creating breakthroughs, and questioning the absence/presence and positioning of publications by B/black women and non-binary collectives. HerStories explores the presence of B/black women and non-binary people’s creativity from print to beyond digital.

The multiplicity of voices in collective constellations sparks a plethora of questions; these questions often lead to even more questions still. Through this roundtable, we will journey to create slow, permeable feedback loops through the archive, back from our futures, to our lived experience, through the digital and back to the archive again. 

If you have any access requirements, please email us in advance at info@iniva.org and we will do our best to accommodate them. The format of this event will be a Zoom webinar, with an opportunity to feed questions to the roundtable participants. 

Biography

Lauren Craig is a London-based cultural futurist. Her practice as an artist, curator, full-spectrum doula and celebrant is untethered, sprawling and liberatory. Carefully marrying concept with materiality, she moves slowly between performance, installation, experimental art writing, exhibition making, moving image, research and photography. Her auto-ethnographic works are meditations on celebration, commemoration and tribute. Through archival research and reactivation, she centres on lived experience while striking through and reframing past and present dominant narratives. She offers her creativity as calls to action to create ethical, cultural memory and collective intelligence. Her work is an invitation to convene and proposition our futurities.

Craig is a member of the social history and curatorial collective Rita Keegan Archive Project (RKAP); its forthcoming exhibition, Between There and Here, opens at South London Gallery in September 2021. Her current project Rendering Experience offers a re-appraisal of Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity (1990), edited by Maud Sulter. Grounded in the present, the research questions the text’s visibility, urgency and art-historical impact on curatorial futurities. Craig’s previous encounters with Passion include RKAP at South London Gallery (2020) and Show and Tell, The Women’s Art Library (2015). Her forthcoming partnerships, publications and events include collaborations with Feminist Review, Photofusion, Eastside Projects, The Women’s Art Library and Arts Catalyst.

ROOT-ed (Revolution Of Our Time) is a self-published zine and social platform, that aims to promote, support, represent and inspire creative people of colour within the North West of England. The zine was founded by artists Amber Akaunu and Fauziya Johnson during their final year at university in which they both studied Fine Art. They both saw a lack of PoC representation in university, media, galleries and museums and felt the need to create this platform to represent the underrepresented by allowing creatives to showcase their talents and skills and voice their thoughts and ideas. ROOT-ed Zine is published quarterly (January, April, July and October), however, expect current and important content throughout our social media platforms including Instagram, Twitter and here on our website.

The Laundry Arts
In 2017 artist-curator Georgina Johnson founded London based arts and curation platform The Laundry as a vehicle from which to support voices in her immediate community and beyond. The platform in its current stage is expanding internationally; with the socio-political at its core, holding the intention of facilitating, nurturing and connecting the dots between a growing network of like-minded local and global artists, creative practitioners and thinkers. With a focus on establishing equity in the arts, TLA is committed to challenging knowledge frameworks and disrupting modes of access. Through The Laundry, Johnson alongside her community, curate, collaborate and work alongside cultural organisations and brands for the production of experiential content as well as independent projects; from exhibitions to books to installations, salons, parties and talks. Cultural collaborators included, The V&A, iniva, Now Gallery, Guest Projects, Amsterdam Art Weekend and more.

LUMIN are a small press, curatorial collective and radio programme based in Cardiff, Wales. LUMIN is broadly the curatorial project of artists Beau W Beakhouse and Sadia Pineda Hameed which often looks to transform and liberate ideas of space; to create space that is radical, revolutionary, empathetic and open. LUMIN Press works through curation, care and dialogue, and is interested in archives, decolonising and democratising print, publishing and the arts, non-Western modes of communication and creating new models of sharing. They have spoken on panels about radical publishing at Cardiff University, Bangor University, the Open University, the g39 WARP symposium, and in the Festival of Voice and the Eisteddfod.