About

Building the Impossible Bridge: Voice Notes on Anti-Racism and / in Institutions

Rajni Shah and Royona Mitra discuss the relationships between anti-racist practices and dreaming new worlds:

What does it mean to do anti-racist work within racist institutions?

How does this relate to the work of dreaming and making new worlds right now?

How do those of us taking on different roles recognise our responsibilities and act in solidarity?

Anti-racist work has breadth and breath.

It is about destroying, creating, dreaming, surviving.

Sometimes, these things feel impossible.

Throughout November, Royona Mitra and Rajni Shah will exchange a series of voice notes, exploring the bridges and gaps between anti-racist work inside and outside of institutional structures. Acknowledging the breadth and breath in their respective practices. Seeking solidarity.

On Friday 20 November, join Arabella Stanger as we gather to listen to these voice notes, and to share the resonances they generate.

Rajni Shah is an artist whose practice is focused on listening and gathering as creative and political acts. Key projects—always created alongside and in collaboration with others—include hold each as we fall (1999), The Awkward Position (2003-2004), Mr Quiver (2005-2008), small gifts (2006-2008), Dinner with America (2007-2009), Glorious (2010-2012), Experiments in Listening (2014-2015), Lying Fallow (2014-2015), Song (2016), I don’t know how (to decolonize myself) (2018), Feminist Killjoys Reading Group (2016-2020) and Listening Tables (2019-2020). In 2021, Rajni will publish a monograph and series of zines as part of the Performance Philosophy Series, entitled Experiments in Listening.

Royona Mitra is Reader in Dance and Performance Cultures at Brunel University London where she is also Associate Dean of Equality and Diversity for the College of Business, Arts and Social Sciences. She is the author of Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (Palgrave; 2015) which was awarded the 2017 de la Torre Bueno First Book Award by the Dance Studies Association (DSA) and her scholarship contributes to discourses on new interculturalism, antiracism and decolonialities in dance and theatre studies. She is a member of ‘Revolution or Nothing’, a network for Black and Global Majority scholars in UK dance, theatre and performance studies, and an advocate for coalitional approaches towards anti-oppression in the academy.

This event is part of Unsettling Sound: a conversation series, hosted by Sussex Performance Events and Research (SPEAR) and Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts