When: Wednesday, June 19, 2024, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PMWhere: BLOC, ArtsOne Building, Queen Mary University of London, 327 Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS
Join us for an evening of poetry, sound, and performance attuning to land, memory, ancestral portals, and decolonised futures
The event is free and open to all. After the performances, there will be drinks and refreshments (including vegetarian/vegan food), and time for conversation.
Ariana Tikao is a Māori writer, musician, and leading player of taonga pūoro (Māori musical instruments) from Aotearoa New Zealand, whose work explores themes of identity, ancestral stories and mana wahine – the power of women. New Zealand Arts Laureate Tikao gives voice to her Kāi Tahu ancestors through their places, creating a portal to their lives, mixed with her experiences of growing up in a colonised reality.
Prerana Kumar (they/them) is an Indian writer and editor based in London. They write about intergenerational inheritances, queer cosmologies, and slippery hauntings as counters to colonial and heteropatriachal legacies. Kumar’s debut pamphlet, Ixora, is out with Guillemot Press and they are currently reading for a doctorate in Creative Writing at QMUL.
Bint Mbareh works with all formats of sound and is driven by the superpowers of communal singing – both human and more-than-human. Her research and practice seek to combat the myth of water scarcity pushed by Israeli settler colonialism, through learning songs that help communities to summon rain, build relationships with their environment and communally determine how to share resources, including the resource of time.
This event is co-hosted by the Epistemologies of the Global South network and the Centre for Contemporary Writing in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London. It has received additional support from Wasafiri, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London.
Image: Tetiana Grypachevska on Unsplash