Our programme strand, Rehearsals (for a world we could live in) will run from 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 is 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.  

In addition to the commissions stemming from this programme (below) we also hosted artist Cassie Thornton as a visiting fellow in November 2024. The Rehearsals programme launched with a series of events running from the 4-15 November 2024.

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, in 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 - Poetic Testimony

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. 

Dorine van Meel - Parhankua: fire, community, and ecological justice 

Dorine is developing a new film commission through the academic connections made during her research visit to Loughborough in February 2025 as a Fellow of Loughborough University's Institute of Advanced Studies. The film starts from the question of how cultural practitioners can work together toward a liveable world, across the divisions between the Global North and South, and beyond colonial modes of inhabiting the Earth based on extraction and exhaustion.  

The film script is being written through a partnership with Felipe Viveros, Marina Flores Cruz, members of the Futuros Indigenas Network, Colectivo Cherani and academics from across Loughborough University departments. 

The visual identity for Rehearsals (for a world we could live in) was created by An Endless Supply.