Live Art Development Agency
Doors open at 18.30
The Garrett Centre, 117 Mansford Street, London, E2 6LX
Please join us for the screening of Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson’s The Gift as the final of four LADA Screens events centred around the themes of voice, care and healing.
Lateisha’s gentle yet fierce film explores the heart-felt intimacies and questions found within healing, belonging and personal growth. Following The Gift, Lateisha will screen the film plant portals: breath (2020) by multidisciplinary artist/filmmaker Nicky Chue (aka seedling library), which connects bumblebees, colonial trauma, alternate universes, and the concept of ‘rest’ in a meditation on the unspoken history many queer and trans people of colour carry, attempting to ask: Can nature heal us?
Lateisha will be joined by collaborators Kes Gill-Martin and Ava Riby-Williams for a discussion and interactive sonic/music offerings.
The Gift (2022) is a single-take style short film, weaving together performance for camera, original sound composition and poetic storytelling that fuses speculative fiction and autobiography. We are invited into the artist’s home, to witness them playfully uncover (and reclaim) stories of grief, body, love, nature and home-making.
Processing the loss of their/her grandfather in 2021, this project became for Lateisha a container of care – a space-holding for their lived experiences of gender, race, class, survivorship, neurodivergence and illness/disability. The Gift invokes the wisdom of Blackness, queerness, ecology, as well as transfeminist futurism ways of being in the world. To stare back into the lens and declare Freedom. To declare what shall be protected – the generative act of Being Truly Seen.
The film was made as part of Lateisha’s participation in the exhibition An Ecology of Mind, seed-commissioned by Bethlem Gallery, that explored the relationships that connect art, ecology and health.
Following the screening, the film will be available to watch online until Saturday 25 May.
Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson is a Black queer eco-feminist performance maker, writer, community-builder/organiser, earthworker and embodied social justice facilitator. Working across art, community action, education, health and climate justice settings for the last 16 years, Lateisha weaves spiritual, somatic and nature-based approaches into their social critical praxis and pedagogy. Lateisha is guided by the principles of transformative storytelling as prophetic wisdom – creating space to meet through the applied lens of care and collective liberation.
Lateisha has worked extensively in stage and screen. Amongst others, Lateisha’s writing-direction includes the immersive interdisciplinary theatre show S/he Breathe/s (Raze Collective, Stanley Arts Centre, Croydon Borough Of Culture, 2023). Lateisha has also performed in John Akomfrah’s Five Murmurations (Lisson Gallery 2021) and Ama Josephine Budge’s Putting The Cooker On Low (Bard CHRA); participated in the exhibition An Ecology of Mind (Bethlem Gallery, 2022); worked in Myah Jeffers’s There Is No Healing in Silence (2020); collaborated with Leeds-based theatre company Speak Woman Speak (2018); and directed a 10-week theatre programme for Routes Collective at the Arcola Theatre, bringing together women from refugee backgrounds (2019).Lateisha’s published writing includes the texts ‘PSX 10 hours // words of witnessing’, commissioned by ]performance s p a c e[ (2022) and ‘grief is a grandmother whose burning hands enshrine light’, commissioned by Artsadmin (2021). Their poetry pamphlet, ‘~the heart is a holding~’ will be published by Burning Eye Books in 2024.
LADA Screens is a series of free, online screenings of seminal performance documentation, works to camera, short films/video and archival footage. It is part of Live Online, LADA’s dedicated space where you can watch short videos and films drawn from LADA’s Study Room or generated through our programmes and initiatives.
Each screening is available to view for a limited time only, and is launched with a live event at our space in Bethnal Green, London.
This film was selected through an open call for short videos and films around the themes of voice, care and healing.
LADA Screens is curated by the Live Art Development Agency (LADA). LADA is a ‘Centre for Live Art’: a knowledge centre, a production centre for programmes and publications, a research centre setting artists and ideas in motion, and an online centre for digital experimentation, representation and dissemination.
more about lada screensWe kindly ask the attendees of the event to wear masks to protect those who are disproportionately affected by the ongoing pandemic. We have a limited supply of disposable masks available at LADA but only while stocks last.
The film is captioned.
LADA and The Garrett Centre are wheelchair accessible by lift and provide gender inclusive bathrooms.
Should you have any particular requirements please email [email protected] and we will be happy to offer further support.
Banner image credit:
Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson, The Gift (film still), 2022.
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