Live Art Writers Network at Take Me Somewhere 2025

The Live Art Writers Network (LAWN) cultivates and supports experimental writing in response to live art and performance. Led by performingborders, this space seeks to address the lack of resources dedicated to critical, reflective, and experimental writing in the live art sector, particularly for practitioners whose work is informed by lived experiences of intersectional borders. LAWN looks to generate multidisciplinary, creative and critical responses to performance that respond to conversations happening on a local level whilst linking to transnational dialogue on performance, publishing, labour, and political action.

Working in collaboration with writer and researcher Diana Damian Martin, this season of LAWN commissions focus on nonconforming editorial and writing practices and we are partnering with Take Me Somewhere Festival (Scotland) to commission Glasgow-based artist HUSS to accompany this year’s festival and its vast transnational programme. They will share a response emerging from their relationship to the city, the festival context and their experience of the programme.

To read more about the festival, and HUSS’ contribution click HERE

HUSS is an Arab multidisciplinary artist, performer, filmmaker, and programmer based in Glasgow. His work tackles queerness, memory, and exile, weaving together personal and political narratives that confront themes of displacement, censorship, and survival. Moving fluidly between film, performance, moving image, installation, sculpture, and sound, his practice creates spaces where fragmented histories and silenced voices can be heard, challenging dominant narratives that often overlook Arab and diasporic experiences. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, from Cairo, Malta, Prague, and Kosovo to the V&A Dundee, Southbank Centre, and Edinburgh Fringe. He has held programming and curating positions at LUX Scotland and Refugee Festival Scotland, and he is currently a curator at the Scottish Queer International Film Festival.

Diana Damian Martin is a writer, artist and researcher working on questions of borders, performance, experimental practices as well as alternative critical cultures and collaborative work. She co-hosts collectives Something Other, Department of Feminist Conversations, Critical Interruptions, Generative Constraints and is a programme leader for the BA (Hons) Performance and Contemporary Arts at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

The LAWN project is an on-going and ever developing network that has commissioned and developed on-going collaborations with with Fierce Festival (Birmingham, UK), METAL Culture (Peterborough and Southend-on-Sea, UK), DDD Festival (Porto, Portugal) and Citemor Festival (Montemor-o-Velho Portugal). To see writing and research from these collaborations: https://performingborders.live/

This iteration of Live Art Writers Network is funded by the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama through UKRI Impact Accelerator funding.