WORK IN PROGRESS: FUTURA GLITCH TOUR: MOVING IMAGE PROJECT
Image: Klimastreikfestival Zürich:a
YASMINE AKIM X AVANTGARDENERS
I will join Livia Rita + the Avantgardeners on FUTURA Glitch’s tour from 25th May to 7th June, a performance frame premiering at Sadler’s Wells’ before 8 unique regional iterations in the UK incorporating local acts. These community-building nights explore futuristic visions in response to the climate crisis and gender-based injustice. I will document the cross-pollination of arts + activism on tour, interviewing regional participants + audiences, integrating diverse perspectives in local environments.
I will R&D using moving image to assess liveness, embedding reflection and research into a video product, which also serves as R&D for this touring model. The CD will be publicly screened regionally with dialogues to reach new audiences and artists.
Biography: I am a photojournalist with experience in fashion and media-based production work. I engage in social photography as a way of transcending negative boundaries through agency. My portraits are collaborations acting as a means of revealing internalized exterior perceptions, in order to find a way back to power through intimacy. I studied Fine Art Photography at The London College of Communication. My work has been exhibited at Autograph ABP as a part of ‘The Missing Chapter Collective’, The Horse Hospital & Ditto Press with my Feminist photo zine ‘Vagina Dentata’ and published by the Independent, Afropunk, The Guardian, VICE, The Face, and Dazed Digital.
MENTORS FOR THE CREATIVE DOCUMENTARY ON FUTURA GLITCH
Amelia Abraham (b. 1991) is a journalist from London and the Managing Editor at Dazed Beauty. Her main interest is LGBTQ identity politics, and she has written on or around this topic for the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Times, the New Statesman, ES Magazine, VICE, i-D magazine and Dazed & Confused. She also writes about feminist issues, human-rights issues, health policy, arts and culture, and sex. She published her book on contemporary LGBTQ+ culture, Queer Intentions, in 2019, followed by We Can Do Better Than This: 35 Voices On The Future of LGBTQ+ Rights in 2021.
Bec Evans is a commissioner, development executive, executive producer, director, programmer and producer with over 10 years experience working in varying roles across factual tv and documentary, narrative film and theatre, and digital content. From 2018-2020 she was Head of Video Development at Dazed Media. Bec’s films centre women and LGBTQIA+ people – those who are most marginalised by society. She is dedicated to supporting new talent through platforms such as the ICA’s STOP PLAY RECORD and New Creatives, festivals, industry awards and community projects. Previously Bec has worked on documentary productions for Netflix, Channel 4, the BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera as well as developing films in collaboration with El Colegio Del Cuerpo, Colombia and The Annenberg Foundation, LA. She has a background working with young people in the UK, USA and Colombia through outreach programmes and bodies such as WAC Arts, El Colegio Del Cuerpo, The Dots and Arts Emergency.
Previous collaborative projects:
‘Many Hands’ is a project that encourages people to make environmental pledges, to coincide with hand portraits that are taken on location in a mini photo booth. Our workshop began at the ‘Under Her Eye’ conference, which was held at The British Library this past June in collaboration with Flow Associates. Layla Hendow and Natalie Lee joined me on the fellowship as a part of the young curators programme with Invisible Dust. I was over the moon when they asked me to be the photographer for the social art project.
Previous collaborations with Livia Rita
Photoshoot at Sadlers Wells Studios, 2021
Documentation of their performance at Vouge Fabrics, 2017
Sounds 4 Survival
Led by SERAFINE1369 and Phoebe Collings-James
New audio work: COUNTERFLOWS
Live performance 2018/19
I was a part of s performance and sound work accompanied by devotional objects (ceramic balls) with a morphing community cast featuring Frederica Agbah, Ain Bailey, Rebecca Bellantoni, Sophie Monique Brown, Chloe Filani, Onyeka Igwe, Joy Labinjo, Reannon Licorish, Katarzyna Perlak.
PERFORMANCES:
Borealis Festival, Bergen (2019) / Cafe Oto, London (2019) / Paradiso, Sonic Acts Festival, Amsterdam (2019) / Wysing Polyphonic, Wysing Arts Centre (2018).
Images:
R - Sounds 4 Survival, Wysing Polyphonic, 2018. Yasmine Akim, Phoebe Collings-James, Onyeka Igwe, Jamila Johnson-Small, Katarzyna Perlak. Image by Wilf Speller.
L Sophia Monique Brown, Bergen, 2019. Image by Yasmine Akim, 2019
ABOUT THE AVANTGARDENERS
The FUTURA Glitch tour is produced by the Avantgardeners Productions, who specialise in curating and producing performances and exhibitions
at the intersections of arts and activism/ Avantgardeners Productions realises the multidisciplinary projects of the international Avantgardeners community, which is a borderless community of creatives and activists cross-pollinating ideas, fears, hopes, and visions for the future. Their swampy garden plants the seeds to imagine and realise future identities and worlds – a space for radical discussion, creation, and possibilities to emerge. As eco-feminists immersed in LGBTQ+ and climate strike communities, they believe in a world outside of gender binary, physical conformity, and nurture an intimacy with our precious ecosystem. Their collaborative approach enables the incorporation of new and radical perspectives, pulsing within shifting societal and political climates.
KISSING FUTURES, LONDON 2019
An unholy matrimony celebrates new possibilities for the future - two surreal wedding ceremonies framed by performance, music, dance and fashion. Pick your night, pick your poison, pick your cure and join a ceremony that might seal our future with a kiss. All you have to do is say I do.
Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England
Supported by Swiss Cultural Fund UK
Photos by Michele Baron.
Performers: Joanna Nastari, Cara Baldwin, Hannah Benson, Jean Ocidio, Bianca Darkwoods, Cosmic Caz.
THE BREXIT WEDDING
A one-in-a-lifetime evening event in September 2017 in response to the Brexit Referendum.
IN THE NAME OF LOVE, we’ll start the future shady underground dealings for exchanging passports. Brexit is breaking our hearts - this is a beautifully broken attempt to repair a failing but fixable geopolitical bond.
We’ll turn the meaning of a wedding upside down. At heart, this Brexit Wedding will reinvent and consecrate new identities: Moving on from traditional, neatly restrictive binary categories like British and Continental, Man and Woman, Husband and Wife, Straight and Gay. We will mark the day of Brexit with a tornado of creative, resistant and youthful force.
