John Stathatos: Three Heraclitean elements

Audio recording of Live Art Development Agency event B Is for Blood: Nastja Säde Rönkkö in Conversation With Gemma Rolls-Bentley.

‘B is for blood in our veins, blood in our belly, between our legs, the flow of life within.’ – from Survival Guide for a Post-Apocalyptic Child

Survival Guide for a Post-Apocalyptic Child is a multidisciplinary project by award-winning video artist Nastja Säde Rönkkö, employing video, sculpture, text and workshops to explore strategies of survival in a world of contiguous crises.

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.

The world’s biggest and only autistic green Drag Queen, Oozing Gloop is back and inspiring people to re-imagine the structures that govern their lives. Defying usual understanding of meaning and belonging, this world to come is run via a new economy of government – Commucracy!  (But what the fuck is Commucracy? Read the manifesto.)

Follow Oozing Gloop on this epic trip, where you’ll find psychoactive solutions for psychopathetic citizens trapped behind the very screens that are there to help them communicate. From the highest to the lowest Oozing Gloop will seek to link the universal to the particular to revive the democratic impulse and pose the communist hypothesis.

Commucracy Now! is a companion piece to Glooptopia!, Oozing Gloop’s latest theatre show, and is a direct challenge to the notion that people with Autism “struggle with social imagination”, and also to the simple fact it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. We have a wealth of apocalyptic omens, disaster movies and critique; but zero 21st century post-capital-culture. Oozing Gloop defies this with revolutionary zeal and determination to open radical new spheres of imagination and fantasy! Just as we got through that, we can get through this!

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

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.

A photo by Dominic Johnson of Amy Sharrocks' Landscape with Fall of Artist. River Thames, London.

A poem by artist Tara Fatehi.

This guide celebrates the diversity and innovation of queer individuals in London, both historically and today. Delving into the cultural history of queerness in the capital, this book guides the reader through a welcoming spectrum of bars, clubs, shops, Pride events, charities, saunas and sex shops that cater to the LGBTQ+ community.

Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist who lived in exile in the United States, was one of the most provocative and complex personalities of the 1970s’ art world. In Where is Ana Mendieta? art historian Jane Blocker provides an in-depth critical analysis of Mendieta’s diverse body of work. Although her untimely death in 1985 remains shrouded in controversy, her life and artistic legacy provide a unique vantage point from which to consider the history of performance art, installation, and earth works, as well as feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism.

Taken from banners carried in a 1992 protest outside the Guggenheim Museum, the title phrase “Where is Ana Mendieta?” evokes not only the suspicious and tragic circumstances surrounding her death but also the conspicuous absence of women artists from high-profile exhibitions. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, Blocker discusses the power of Mendieta’s earth-and-body art to alter, unsettle, and broaden the terms of identity itself. She shows how Mendieta used exile as a discursive position from which to disrupt dominant categories, analyzing as well Mendieta’s use of mythology and anthropology, the ephemerality of her media, and the debates over her ethnic, gender, and national identities.

Playing Public: Performing Participation with Pens, Planes, and People is an A5 format artist/research publication and project archive focusing on participatory game Flight Club and the years that preceded its creation. Charting my participatory art journey from prior experiments and involvement with community groups and public-facing, performative events leading up to the production of Flight Club and its iterations, written and photographic documentation combine to show how this game emerged and developed through participation, community and open-source collaboration.

Let’s Pretend None of This Ever Happened documents neon, LED and other text works by the British artist Tim Etchells. The book creates a compelling and comprehensive investigation of Etchells’ projects in public space and galleries, leading with images of key works installed in sites all over the world.

Alongside its wide-ranging image survey, this work features an extended conversation between the artist and Jule Hillgärtner, director of Kunstverein Braunschweig, as well as a text by curator Ben Borthwick.

Surveying the full range and approaches of Etchells’ sculptural work with text, Let’s Pretend None of This Ever Happened creates dialogue across the artist’s works spanning sixteen years, as well as exploring the complex relation between individual works and the different contexts in which they have been installed over the last several decades.

Dinner with America is the second in a trilogy of performance installations addressing the complexities of cultural identity in the 21st Century. Where the first piece in the trilogy, Mr Quiver (Nuffield Autumn 07), explored Indian and English stereotypes, this piece questions what America means to us.

As the performance space shifts and transforms around the audience, it gently uncovers themes of consumerism, rights, ownership, voices, hopes, harvest and division in a visually compelling and unusual piece of work.

This booklet was published in November 2008 to accompany the touring production of Dinner with America by Rajni Shah Theatre. All images, films and texts were made during and as part of the creative process. They are designed to illuminate both the core and outlying ideas that inhabited the artists’ thinking at the time of making the show, between February 2007 and November 2008.