performingborders presented artists Rosa-Johan Uddoh and Party Office in an open online conversation exploring their upcoming performingborders commissions: an annual multimedia commission and a guest-curated digital pamphlet, both published in the Summer 2024 which add to the tapestry of international reflections and practices on performativity and borders, exploring themes of purpose, spiritual explorations, performative practice, and more.
In her New Apparitions, co-commissioned in partnership with performance, possession, and automation, Rosa-Johan Uddoh created a blog documenting a re-enchantment with the world through afro-diasporic spiritual practice, textual, and visual apparitions. For this commission, Rosa was moved to recommence a pilgrimage she started when she was 19. The photos and writing are the documentation and reflection on her journey.
In their we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for, Party Office created a digital commission rooted in poet and activist June Jordan’s Poem for South African Women (1978) curating an assembly of artists who are forerunners of the story-telling of their people and histories. Blue Paul Flaming, Sajan Mani, and Fehras Publishing Practices contribute with a ‘translational’ dialogue through performance, videos and writing. This assembly of artists and thinkers reflects on solidarity as something that brings us to empathise, bear witness, translate and rage, through personal potentialities.
Video recorded by HowlRound Theatre Commons (English).
Rosa-Johan Uddoh is an interdisciplinary artist working towards radical self-love, inspired by Black feminist practice and writing. Through performance, writing, film, and multimedia installation, she explores the effects of specific places, objects, and characters in popular culture, on self-formation. Rosa was shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2022 for her filmmaking, and Iniva’s Stuart Hall Library Artist-in-Residence in 2020. Rosa is a lecturer in performance at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London, and her first book, Practice Makes Perfect, was published by Book Works and Focal Point Gallery in 2022.
Vidisha-Fadescha is an artist, curator, and a cultural critic. Through lived experience of a radical gender, caste, race, and disability, they suggest centering one’s own pleasure and wellbeing as a liberatory practice towards abolition. Their artwork includes video, sound, text, and performance. Fadescha founded Party Office, an anti-caste, anti-racist, trans-feminist, Queer Anarchist, art and social space and time in 2020. Through collective practices, publications, grants, archives, parties, geographic refuge, and more, they are building translational dialogues on empathetic futures, care communities, and radical agency. Party Office b2b Fadescha was a lumbung artist at documenta fifteen 2022.
Photo credit: (Left) Rosa-Johan Uddoh, photo by Louis Brown. (Right) Photo by Vidisha-Fadescha.