A day of performance, film and discussion by queer artists. Help amplify those voices less heard in the climate conversation as we empower ourselves to change our future together.

11am-8pm.
Tickets for Edythe Woolley and Ania Varez: £10/£8 concessions. All other events are free and unreserved. Buy tickets for both shows and receive 20% off.

PROGRAMME

11am-5pm, Xavier de Sousa and Andre Neely: Open Studio
4-5pm, performance sharing
Xavier de Sousa and Andre Neely are in residence at Toynbee Studios throughout 2 Degrees Festival, exploring how climate protest, queer activism and performative action can lead to domino-effect replications. You are invited to join this open studio sharing to participate, contribute to and witness the research undertaken.

The artists are also hosting a free discussion event on Friday 5 June at 7.30pm.

Andre Neely is an artist working predominantly in live performance, writing and time-based mediums. Currently occupied with reflective research on personal, collective and spatial healing practices, they seek new ways of finding togetherness between each other and the world around us in times of crisis.

Xavier de Sousa is a performance maker, curator and producer whose practice explores personal and political heritage and the dichotomies between the live experience and agency in the performance space.

12pm and 3.30pm, Ania Varez: Guayabo

Through story-telling, film and the long-distance exchange of rituals of celebration and grief, people are invited to connect with Ania’s family in Venezuela and with the severe humanitarian crisis they live in, challenging the boundaries of acting and caring for one another, as mediums for survival, transformation and belonging.

Ania Varez is a Venezuelan interdisciplinary artist based in Bristol, UK. Through different mediums such as choreography, text, film and sound, she facilitates opportunities for people to exercise care, choice and attention, looking for new ways of being together and being here.

1.30-3.30pm, Ama Josephine Budge: Speculative Fabulations – Resisting Climate Colonialism

Speculative writer, curator, researcher and pleasure activist Ama Josephine Budge transposes you into a time-space-glitch, where queer Black futures are possible, and multispecies justice holds the imperial and colonial anchors of climate change to account. Reading her speculative fabulation A Shoal of Lovers Leads Me Home* audiences are invited to sit, listen and breathe, to “feel the heat”; in an installation of climate changed futures. This performative reading is followed by an in-conversation with writer, poet and activist Selina Nwulu and Imani Robinson.
*First published by Anathema: Spec from the Margins in issue 5 (2018).

Ama Josephine Budge's (@amjamb) work navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism, working to activate movements that catalyse human rights, environmental evolutions and troublesomely queered identities. Ama is a PhD candidate in Psychosocial Studies with Dr Gail Lewis at Birkbeck University; her research takes a queer, decolonial approach to challenging climate colonialism in Sub-Saharan Africa with a particular focus on inherently environmentalist pleasure practices in Ghana and Kenya.

Selina Nwulu (@SelinaNwulu) is a writer, essayist and social researcher with a focus on social and environmental justice, education and global politics. Her work has been featured in Vogue, Blavity, i-D and ES Magazine among others, she has also written for The Guardian, Red Pepper, Sable Litmag and the New Humanist. Selina was awarded the Young Poet Laureate for London 2015-16.

Imani Robinson is a London-based writer and curator. In 2018 she curated Some of Us Did Not Die, an exhibition and research residency exploring the intersections between environmental justice and racial justice at ONCA Gallery, Brighton, where she is a Trustee.

5–6pm, Matthew Todd

Matthew Todd is a multi-award-winning writer who has made two films for Newsnight, writes for The Guardian and was editor of the UKs best-selling gay magazine, Attitude, for 8 years. His play, Blowing Whistles, has been performed in the UK and Australia and his first book, Straight Jacket, was described as an essential read for every gay person on the planet by Sir Elton John and won Boyz LGBT Book of the Year. His new book, Pride – The story of the LGBTQ Equality Movement, is out now from Carlton Books. He has written a piece for the forthcoming Extinction Rebellion book, This Is Not A Drill, published in June.

6-7pm, Edythe Woolley: FISHY

Contains nudity.
This work is highly visual and therefore suitable for D/deaf audiences.

We live in the Anthropocene: a geological era testifying to the permanent impact human activity has had on the planet. Micro-plastics contaminate waterways, oceans, bodies and have even been fossilised, leaving remnants for future generations to discover.

FISHY is a visually mesmerizing post-punk performance. Edythe uses the grotesque to create a dreamy turned nightmarish queer underworld that explores the altered ecosystems of our impending future. Here, the old-world slips and collides with the industrial pop Anthropocene.

Described as “Surreal and sassy as fuck” (Great SEXpectations) Edythe is an interdiciplinary performance artist who confuses the glamorous and the grotesque creating dreamlike, visceral and playfully political performances that foreground queer feminist narratives.