Documenting live? – Looking for liveness in the archive of the Live Art Development Agency in London

Working across Live Art and music on a project that has combined their research with the work of numerous artists and other researchers, Dhanveer and Nick have been exploring the connections between the histories and legacies of plantation slavery and the present-day realities of industrial and post-industrial automation. Performance, they suggest, is one place to look for traces of this connection, and for exploring potential for practical and spiritual refusal.

How might the activity of gathering for live performance be a way of making life in automated capitalism liveable? Why does losing yourself in dance sometimes look and feel like being automated?

Dhanveer and Nick will share some of their recent work in an informal presentation, which will be followed by audience questions and discussion.

Audio documentation of performance, possession + automation: Dhanveer Singh Brar and Nicholas Ridout in Conversation at LADA on Wednesday 21 May 2025

Unfixed Archives is amonthly radio show podcast on RTM radio, taking listeners on an audio journey that investigates how archivists and artists work with performance, why they do what they do, and what happens to performance once it’s ‘finished’.

Audio recording of the Unfixed Archives: Holders of Liveness – Podcast Launch on Friday 27 June 2025.

LADA partnered with Shubbak Festival 2025 to co-present Lara Habib Kobeissi’s Nazar, a one-to-one VR performance that engages all five senses in a transformative ritual rooted in protection practices from Southern Lebanon.

Audio documentation of conversation between Lara Habib Kobeissi and Shubbak festival director Alia Alzougbi on Wednesday 11 June 2025.

The conversation explored Lara’s process of making Nazar, including the movement from archival research to intimate world-building through virtual reality, ritual and touch. The talk looked at digital archiving as an act of soft resistance, aimed at restoring collective memory and intangible heritage.

Nuidey is a short film made on an iPhone. It depicts three middle-aged queers, two of them fat, dancing in the Western Isles in slow motion in June 2024. They are naked.

There is a soundtrack of twangy music and reflections by the performers, which are subtitled. The reflections concern the place, light, rationale; fat subjectivity; what it is to be seen in real life and online; illness and decision-making. The conversation is intimate, the performers know each other well.

The film was conceived of and made by Charlotte Cooper as an expansion of her book Fat Body Work (2025 33editions).

The film was screened as part of Live Art Bookshop: Fat Body Work Launch at LADA on Wednesday 29 October 2025.

Miranda Whall’s performance practice employs crawling as a tool that enables her to embody, inhabit and understand a place and its narratives from a four-legged rather than two-legged perspective. So far she has crawled through mountains, woodland, rivers, seaside promenades, tidal mudflats an island and urban centres. On Saturday 6th November 2021 she crawled with a 6-year-old potted Scots Pine on her back through the centre of Glasgow – from the Glasgow Sculpture Studios on Dawson Road to the COP26 Green Zone in the Science Centre on the Clyde Waterfront Regeneration area. Passers-by ignored, laughed, stared, cheered and filmed as the tree and Miranda silently and determinedly made their way through heavy rain and high winds to reach their destination. The intention of Miranda’s heroic/tragic/comic slow and gentle art activism is an expression of her grief, despair and outrage with a world dominated by corporate and personal greed and an insistence that non-human nature, and in this case trees, be put at the centre of discussions on how to mitigate the climate emergency and ecological crisis. Animals, plants, trees, air, earth and oceans should be, metaphorically, sitting at the discussion table with heads of government and delegates.

Miranda’s hope is that crawling to the COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference carrying a tree, that was equal in size to her body, might inspire human beings to re-think and re-align their relationship to trees, seeing them not only as a resource to use and abuse but as an ally and a vital source of knowledge. She believes that we all literally need to get down from our human centric, two-legged, dominant and hierarchical position and start recognising our non-human vegetal others as equals, and as sentient beings with a voice – that we crucially need to listen to if we are to find a way out of our human made catastrophe.

Crossed Paths – Scots Pine premiered as part of LADA Screens and was available to watch online from 4 July until 4 August 2022.

This video was screened as part of Land, Material, Memory at Tate Britain on Saturday 28 February 2026.

ouTcasT (2018) is a performance for The Rising, a programme from ]performance s p a c e [ in Folkestone, Kent.
The documentation was screened by LADA for Land, Material, Memory at Tate Britain.

Beer Advertisement (Dyke, Just Do It) (2025) is a two-cannel video installation by SWEATMOTHER, presented at LADA as part of Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest exhibition The Body Is a Thing in Time, curated by kane stonestreet.

F A U L T L I N E S (2022) is a performance video from SITE, screened at LADA as part of Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest exhibition The Body Is a Thing in Time, curated by kane stonestreet.

peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must (2024) is a video by Joshua Woolford, screened at LADA as part of Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest exhibition The Body Is a Thing in Time, curated by kane stonestreet.

(dis)closure (2025) is a performance by kane stonestreet at CEREMONY, a festival from Future Ritual. The documentation was screened at LADA as part of Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest exhibition The Body Is a Thing in Time, curated by kane stonestreet.

cock~salt (2025) is a performance to camera by Claye Bowler, screened at LADA as part of Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest exhibition The Body Is a Thing in Time, curated by kane stonestreet.