La Pocha Nostra’s Live Art Laboratory: An artistic reflection on radical pedagogy

In June 2015 Ria Righteous attended the 12-day intensive cross-cultural workshop hosted by La Pocha Nostra at the Athens School of Fine Arts. Along with 27 international participants, she fondly recalls a ‘temporary community of rebel artists’ who navigated complex politics, personal identities in and out of context, and the creation of extraordinary live performances. This webinar presents her reflections on artistic experimentation across disciplines, generations and cultural contexts and how this informed her future work.

This event is part of a programme celebrating La Pocha Nostra’s extraordinary work on the occasion of the screening of 100 Ways to Cross the Border on July 9. You can see all the upcoming events here.

Biography

Ria Righteous (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist crafted in performance, theatre and Live Art. She has also worked collaboratively as a researcher, mentor, workshop leader, presenter and consultant. Grounded on decolonial-queer-feminist frameworks and informed by her lived experience, Ria makes process-based biographically driven work that explores the intersections of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. She approaches her practice as a contextual life enquiry that responds to generations of systemic violence and oppression and she is concerned with the decolonisation, healing, reclamation and transformation of her psyche and soma. Ria pays close attention to memory, identity, human relationships and the rewriting of narratives. She often invites participation and exchange between herself and audiences, seeking to blur the relationship between the performer and the audience, the space and the situation in order to open new possibilities of thought and exchange. She is the founder of ecologies of care, an initiative to ensure best practice for artists across the sector. Ria is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Castlefield Gallery Associate. She joined LADA in June 2023, initially as Interim Artistic Director, and from June 2024 as Artistic Consultant.