Sounds from Beneath, Part 3 from XENON: an exploded opera

Video documentation of THE CALL CENTRE with Artist in Residence Samra Mayanja and Riot + the Ether co-presented with Newington Green Meeting House.

Curated and hosted by Samra Mayanja, THE CALL CENTRE has become a monthly must-see in London’s Live Art calendar. Initiated in and usually taking place in her studio, Samra has created a framework not only about, but in service to, that difficult task that we engage with every day, which is to speak. To say ourselves and to speak ourselves, and to make the decision with every word and every breath not to hide.

For each CALL CENTRE, Samra invites cross-disciplinary artists and writers to share live work with and alongside her. This framework comes from her impulse to contextualise her own work through the artists whose work she loves.

In this special edition of THE CALL CENTRE  Samra stepped out of her 21 seater studio and joined the long-line of dissenting voices that have spoken out in the chapel at Newington Green Meeting House.

Riot + the Ether presented ‘the impossible big’ on Saturday 07 February, 2026.

Video documentation of a one-off event hosted at LADA. Artist Tim Etchells invited performer Rosana Cade and musician Angharad Davies to join him in an encounter working with text loop fragments and violin improvisation. Drawing on Etchells’ practice in which language distorts and transforms through repetition and in dialogue with sound elements, More details are slowly falling in was a collaborative experiment in which three unique artists bring their considerable individual experience and perspectives to play, inventing and exploring sonic material together.

The starting point for the performance was a set of text fragments taken from Etchells’ notebook – overheard comments, puzzling images and questions – which take their place in layers of voice and violin in compositions where texture, energy and musicality are as important as semantics.

The event was hosted at The Garrett Centre on Saturday 21 February, 2026

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.

Sonia Boyce (b.1962) is a groundbreaking artist whose practice is founded on taking creative risks. Unafraid to play against set expectations about how art should behave, her collaborative interactions between audience and performer enable spontaneous and intimate social encounters, resulting in the creation of work that is simultaneously self-aware, visceral and open-ended.

This book is a much-anticipated introduction to the life and work of this extraordinary artist. Touching on her engagement with the work of other feminist artists and her time as a leading figure in the 1980s Black British Art movement, it contextualizes Boyce’s journey from her early pastel drawings and collages to her pivotal shift to film, sound, and performance art. Highlighting her artistic innovation as she experiments with medium to explore and question culture, identity and the boundaries between the public and private spheres in unexpected ways, it celebrates the visionary practice of a truly uncompromising artist.

“When Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil invited Célio Turino to develop a programme to democratise access to culture, no one could have imagined the extraordinary initiatives that today cross Brazil from one extreme to the other: from semi-arid sertão to the sea, from Amazônia to the fertile lowlands of the South. The Ponto de Cultura programme has provided instruments for the multiple voices of a diverse nation to find expression in music, literature, petry… Turino’s book is a map of living Brazilian Popular Culture, disseminated to every corner of a nation that is finally seeking to be a country for everyone.” -Emir Sader

Documents the work of fourteen performance artists who marked the personal and political resonances of the new Millennium in a series of site-specific actions. Contrasting with the epic, populist and homogenising nature of the official celebrations, these works focused on forgotten and ephemeral experiences, enacting small but significant interventions in the public sphere.

In this short book, the leading German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen puts forward a fresh and original account of pop music. He argues that pop music is not so much a form of music as a constellation of different media channels, social spaces and behavioural systems, of which music is only a part. Its own logic of attraction is based less on compositions and the expression of subjectivity and more on indexicality, real or psuedo-involunatary effects as recorded by sound technologies, and on studio discipline and staging, and hence on performance.

By elaborating his innovative account of pop music as a constellation, Diederichsen develops a theory that distinguishes itself from sociology, cultural studies, media studies and ethnography, while at the same time drawing on and encompassing them all.

Video documentation of an artist conversation with Sahera Khan on 1st March 2024 at The Garrett Centre. This conversation followed screening of Sahera’s film My Glow as part of our LADA Screens programme on Voice, Care and Healing. Following the screening Sahera engaged in a Q&A with the audience and gave a short BSL lesson.

In My Glow (2023), Aa mature, Deaf, Muslim, British Sign Language (BSL) mother shares her pregnancy journey through the pandemic, and how she coped with limited communication with others such as the health service.

This is a video file. For a version with closed captions, visit our vimeo channel