We are delighted to share details of Radar’s new programme strand, Rehearsals (for a world we could live in), which will run for two years, 2024-2026. The programme explores practices of world building, or worlding, which enact and perform more just and liveable worlds, alongside the concept of the rehearsal, both in terms of a slow and committed practice of learning and working-towards, and also in reference to the concept of rehearsal in a Black feminist liberationist lineage: for example how Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes abolition, as life in rehearsal.  

The Rehearsals programme will commission a series of artists whose work imagines new worlds or ways of living, from more equitable healthcare systems, to climate solidarity networks, to embodied forms of justice. This programme connects to research happening across Loughborough University, from the Health Humanities research group, to the Institute for Advanced Studies, to researchers in English, Sociology, Politics, Architecture and more.  

The first three commissions stemming from this programme are to artists Dani Admiss & Luiza Prado, Nat Raha and Helene Kazan. In partnership with the Institute of Advanced Studies, we are also hosting artist Cassie Thornton as a visiting fellow this November. The Rehearsals programme will launch with a series of events running from the 4th-15th November.  

  

Artist Commissions:  

 

Dani Admiss and Luiza Prado: The World is a Mill  

The World is a Mill (TWM) is a pilot project bringing together artists and communities collaborating in recipe mapping and food sharing workshops, community cooking, and peer learning. Together with Radar, Admiss and Prado will develop TWM towards a long-term project, initially rooted in the Midlands and expanding to encompass further partnerships. 

Worldwide, the climate and nature emergency is creating new states of existential precarity. In response the artists ask, how do we think, feel, and sense our way through extinction, instability and displacement to find new conceptions of solidarity, collectivity and belonging? TWM aims to articulate and experiment with the types of coordination and synergy needed between local, dispersed and displaced communities in climate breakdown. Alternative forms of recipe exchange, food sharing and food as cultural preservation are used to explore how the experimental knowledge and sensorial methodologies of growing and eating can contribute to climate action. 

  

  

Nat Raha: Liberation Laboratory  

Centring transfeminist, queer and abolitionist practices and approaches to mutual aid and collective worldmaking, the liberation laboratory intends to connect people involved in LGBTQI+ mutual aid projects, wider community members, and performance artists. Adopting methods of live research and self-study, through public and closed discussions, knowledge sharing, hangouts and performance practices, the lab will function as a space made for comparing notes on approaches, practical methods and on infrastructures of collective support.   

The Liberation Lab will also explore the relationship between queer performance practices and the ‘performance’ of collective worldmaking, by putting the two in dialogue with each other.  Raha will link up with a range of activist groups, potentially in a few different cities, to order to foster the conditions of research and study.  The work is based on theoretical ideas from Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift’s book, Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024); and as part of the project, Nat will continue to develop an ongoing, reflective performance work, solidarity & house.   

  

Helene Kazan 

For Radar, artist Helene Kazan will conduct a poetic investigation into the modern geopolitics of cotton, grounded in the Midlands’ history of textile production. Kazan will undertake a series of research trips to the region, as well as connect to interdisciplinary practitioners at Loughborough. The project will develop as a time-based audio-visual work sharing the discovery of the poetic investigative process. 

  

  

Bios :

 

Dr Dani Admiss is an artist, curator and educator. Her work is a journey of learning to live well with others within limits. She champions community-based learning and uses her role of ‘curator’ as a shared space for collective inquiry, story building and meaning making, often working with a coalition of agitators, dream weavers, growers and caregivers. Together, they have created a holistic decarbonisation plan for art workers (Stanley Picker Gallery), designed immersive game-environments that unwittingly extract data in exchange for public services (Furtherfield), formed a Bill of More-Than-Human Rights (Porto Design Festival), and set up an alternative ethics committee for eco and social conservation (MAAT, Lisbon).   

Under the name of the Sunlight Liberation Network, she is currently creating an ethical learning program for ‘greener’ and fairer art practices (Arts Catalyst) and running a slow “companion-planting” working group (Creative Scotland) exploring regenerative cultures and alternative configurations of working in the arts.   

Admiss has created numerous exhibitions, conferences, workshops, and edited books, in the UK, the EU and internationally. She was an Artangel Making Time resident (2023) and a Stanley Picker Fellow (2020). Her PhD is in Curatorial Practice and World-Making with an AHRC grant, and she is an advisor on the editorial board of ‘Digital Materialities and Sustainable Futures’ Book series, Emerald Press. 

 

Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist, writer and scholar. Her work moves between installation and herbalist practices, using performance and ritual as a way of invitation and activation for audiences. Her practice explores relations and knowledge between plants, political infrastructures, and technology, and questions what structures and processes are needed for collective concerns of environmental care and reproductive justice. She holds a PhD from the University of the Arts Berlin, and an MA from the University of the Arts Bremen.  

Her ongoing artistic research project, “Un/Earthings and Moon Landings” narrates, through a series of artworks, the extinction and later reappearance of an ancient contraceptive, aphrodisiac and spice called silphium. She has exhibited and performed work at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg (MUDAM), the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Museum Ostwall (Dortmund), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum (Cologne), the National Museum of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Savvy Contemporary, Arebyte Gallery, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Kampnagel, among others. She is currently based in Berlin. 

 

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. She works through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance.  

 Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (Winner of the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize, 2024), of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). Nat’s work is anthologised in 100 Queer Poems (Vintage 2022), We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018). Her poetry has been translated in numerous languages. Recent performances include epistolary (on carceral islands), co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 2023. Recent critical writing appears in Queer Print in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2022), Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021), New Feminist Literary Studies (CUP, 2020) and Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’, 2021). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat co-edits Radical Transfeminism zine, and is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024).  

  

Helene Kazan is an artist and writer. Drawing on feminist methodologies, Kazan’s work explores how radical poetics can express and translate the experience of violence. Investigating the colonial foundations of international law and its violent impact today, her work privileges embodied knowledge in the form of poetic testimony. As the process makes attempts towards expanded frameworks of reparative justice, in its interaction and recognition by the law and beyond.  
   
Kazan’s work has been exhibited and published with institutions internationally including: Sharjah Biennial 16 (2025); Beirut Art Center (2023); Mosaic Rooms, London (2023); e-flux (2022); maatEXT & Art Jameel (2022); Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2019); Vera List Center, New School, NYC (2018); Serpentine Gallery, London (2017); Tate, London (2015); House of World Cultures (HKW), Berlin (2014) and The Showroom, London (2013). Kazan received her doctorate from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London (2019) and is a Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University.  www.helenekazan.co.uk 

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