Monday 26 February 2024, 7.30pm
Following a sold-out event at Sutton House & Breaker's Yard in June 2023, the Blue House presents new live work by: Rhoda Adum Boateng, Petero Kalulé (petals), dove / Chris Kirubi, Shenece Oretha, Nat Raha, No Home / Charlie Valentine and Daniel Baker-Wells.
The artists work with improvisation, poetry, spoken word, free jazz, print, sculpture, workshops and sound installation. The Blue House @ Cafe OTO will include the launch of a limited edition vinyl featuring exclusive recordings by the artists.
The Blue House desires to encounter or conjure a future where institutional structures might have collapsed and envision how we might try to live and play together in the absence, or failures of those structures.
Rhoda Adum Boateng is a writer and archivist, she writes under the moniker trusting mechanics to think through possibilities in maintenance and metabolization. Rhoda is in the current cohort of the Griot’s Well Poetry Development Programme and is a member of BORN::FREE writer’s collective. She works as Project Archivist for the McKenzie Heritage Picture Archive, a large-scale collection of Black and Asian photography at Black Cultural Archives. Recent workshops and readings include speculative planning & the shared city (2023) at LARC, Rear View (2023) at Biblioteka and a world without you is not a world: reading & writing black feminist futures (2021) at Glasgow Zine Library.
https://trustingmechanics.substack.com
Daniel is a queer artist, curator and filmmaker. Their ongoing interdisciplinary project Wild England, explores queer wilderness, belonging and identity through embodied critiques of English romantic traditions in film, music and performance. Their short film The Princess and the Peacock is due for festival release in 2024.
petals is a composer, poet, and multi-instrumentalist. petals is interested in play, improvisation, gathering, sound, and the potentialities of dreaming.
Her first collection of poems Kalimba was published by Guillemot Press in May 2019; and marsh-river-raft- feather, a second collection, in collaboration with Clarissa Alvarez, was published by Guillemot Press in May 2021. A new collection & glee & bless is forthcoming with Guillemot Press in 2024.
https://peterokalule.bandcamp.com/
dove / Chris Kirubi is a poet-artist based in London. Recent projects and performances include The Archive is a Gathering Place at Tate Britain in collaboration with Rhoda Boateng, The Blue House co-founded with Daniel Baker-Wells, and a collaborative improvisation at Décalé with (petals) Petero Kalulé. Recent commissioned texts include Fabulous Musics published in response to Shenece Oretha's UAL 20/20 commission with Hepworth Wakefield and a note on audrey mbugua's dog published in the Jerwood Survey III catalogue in response to Ebun Sodipo's work. They are a lecturer at Slade School of Fine Art.
Shenece is a London-based multidisciplinary artist sounding out the voice and sound’s mobilising potential. Through installation, performance, print, sculpture, sound, workshops and text she amplifies and celebrates listening and sound as an embodied and collective practice. Recent solo exhibitions include Cell Project Space and Cafe OTO project space. Group exhibitions include: ‘Survey II’ (g39, Cardiff; Jerwood Arts, London; Site Gallery, Sheffield); ‘Cinders, Sinuous and Supple’ (Les Urbaines, 2019, Switzerland); ‘PRAISE N PAY IT/ PULL UP, COME INTO THE RISE’ (2018, South London Gallery). Residencies: Wysing Arts Centre. Recent performances at: LUX; Somerset House Studios; Storm Den Haag; Cafe OTO; Wysing Arts Centre; 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning; Auto Italia South East.
https://black-whole.info/
Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to the everyday of marginalised lives, hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, of humans and the more-than-human. Her books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013) and apparitions (nines) (Winner of the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize, forthcoming 2024). Her creative and critical writing as recently appeared in 100 Queer Poems, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, Queer Print in Europe, Transgender Marxism and Third Text. With Mijke van der Drift, Nat co-edits Radical Transfeminism zine, and is currently co-authoring a book Trans Femme Futures: An Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (forthcoming, 2024).
https://sociopatheticsemaphores.blogspot.com
No Home is a London based artist who has been making music for the last half a decade. Described as a ‘punk producer’ and ‘DIY experimental artist’ by the Wire Magazine (August 2020), No Home has produced a prolific string of EPs and albums and performs regularly in London and internationally. Their recent album, Young Professional “is about a young professional falling deep deep deep into the tangle of meaning(less/ful) life and even deeper into something more insidious and coming out maybe as the final girl and into something less human but closer to the earth.” (November 2022).
https://nohome.bandcamp.com/album/young- professional
