Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love

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

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.

Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content.

A visual diary zine of the Chines photographer SickGirl’s (@eeriesickgirl) Exile Route between 25 Dec 2023 and 16 Nov 2024.

A collection of poems and drawings self-published by political theatre maker Maya at an important period during their life and inspired much of their later work.

This collection brings together six seminal works of British alternative feminist and women’s theatre from the archive, with a contextual introductory text by Dr. Susan Croft, co-founder of Unfinished Histories.

Making performance works for four decades, British experimental theatre collective Forced Entertainment has become globally renowned for its singular aesthetic and audacious events, melding narrative fragments with strange acts, broken poetry, audience provocations, and comcial failure. With its low-fi theatre, intimate text-based works, and epic durational spectacles, the group has profoundly influenced the international performance scene, evoking and testing the politics of contemporary life.

I Love You Too is a project from a visual artist focused on the writing of letters, shifting the focus from how a community uses a library to how it creates one – a library, in this case, of love. The stories in this book were told during the COVID-19 pandemic by more than 100 people from across Manchester. Through in-person and online interviews with 11 writers, their testimonies were transformed into this collection of love letters. To ensure all those involved felt safe and supported while sharing their deeply personal stories, well-being managers were on hand at every stage of the process. By way of thanks, each participant was gifted a portrait created at the time of their interview. Thank you to the people of Manchester for sharing these beautiful and personal stories with us.

South African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere spent MIF19 in residence in Manchester’s network of libraries – and two years on, published I Love You Too, a beautiful book inspired by the time he spent in the city.

At the start of 2021, Wa Lehulere invited more than 100 people from across Manchester to share with us their love stories: to people, to places, even to possessions. Through a series of online and in-person meetings, a group of 11 Manchester writers put their words on to the page. The result is I Love You Too, a personal, powerful and inspiring 232-page hardback book of love letters rooted in our city – and the first in an international series.

The Bolivian scholar and activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is a pre-eminent Latin American intellectual, world renowned for her work in postcolonial and subaltern studies.  She has long maintained that we must acknowledge how colonial structures of domination continue to affect indigenous identities and cultures. Even in contexts where diversity and the value of indigenous cultures have been officially recognized, “internal colonialism” operates as a structure that shapes mental categories and social practices.

This book considers this persistent colonial structure by examining artistic and popular practices of apprehending and resisting it, arguing that in Andean cultures there is a sustained practice of insubordinate image production and use. Combining this visual history with other instances of political resistance, the book offers an alternative narrative to the history of Latin American decolonisation.  This narrative challenges the common conception that mestizaje (race-mixing) and hybridity are liberatory formations, offering instead a new theorisation of the complex racial configurations produced by colonialism and its afterlives.

Given Rivera Cusicanqui’s vital contribution to critical epistemologies, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences and to everyone concerned with the key questions of critical theory today.

What do cinematic “universes,” cloud archiving, and voice cloning have in common? They’re in the business of foreverizing – the process of revitalizing things that have degraded, failed, or disappeared so that they can remain active in the present. To foreverize something is to reanimate it, to enclose and protect it from time and the elements, and to eradicate the feeling of nostalgia that accompanies loss. Foreverizing is a bulwark against instability, but it isn’t an infallible enterprise. That which is promised to last forever often does not, and that which is disposed of can sometimes last, disturbingly, forever.

In this groundbreaking book, American philosopher Grafton Tanner develops his theory of foreverism: an anti-nostalgic discourse that promises growth without change and life without loss. Engaging with pressing issues from the ecological impact of data storage to the rise of reboot culture, Tanner tracks the implications of a society averse to nostalgia and reveals the new weapons we have for eliminating it.

The global crisis of our time involves a complex of ecological, economic, technological and migratory challenges that no state is able to control. The result is a provincialisation of our democracies with respect to the new planetary powers confronting humanity. It is from this that our increasingly impotent and rabid politics stems.  Paradoxical as it may seem, it is precisely the decline of the nation-state that is the source of the great nationalist uprising of our time.

We need a new planetary vision that is able to reclaim and liberate our world, starting today and engaging each of us. This is the task of philosophy as much as it is of politics, of theory as it is of activism. Connecting with a new generation taking to the streets across the globe, this book tells the story of the ever-closer union of our world, from the age of empire to the climate crisis, and presents a plea and a roadmap to step beyond the mental and material boundaries of our nations.

What do the invention of anaesthetics in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Nazis’ use of cocaine, and the development of Prozac have in common? The answer is that they’re all products of the same logic that defines our contemporary era: ‘the age of anaesthesia’. Laurent de Sutter shows how large aspects of our lives are now characterised by the management of our emotions through drugs, ranging from the everyday use of sleeping pills to hard narcotics. Chemistry has become so much a part of us that we can’t even see how much it has changed us.

In this era, being a subject doesn’t simply mean being subjected to powers that decide our lives: it means that our very emotions have been outsourced to chemical stimulation. Yet we don’t understand why the drugs that we take are unable to free us from fatigue and depression, and from the absence of desire that now characterizes our psychopolitical condition.  We have forgotten what it means to be excited because our only excitement has become drug-induced.  We have to abandon the narcotic stimulation that we’ve come to rely on and find a way back to the collective excitement that is narcocapitalism’s greatest fear.