Nat Raha: epistolary (on carceral islands)
Nuns Island Theatre, Galway
Sunday 12 November 2023
2pm - 3pm
A performance addressing the history and development of island prisons across the globe through the colonial project of the British Empire. The work travels from Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, to outposts of ‘empyre’ such as Spike Island, Ireland, and to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. The performance will take the form of a sonically expansive, trans-historical poem-letter addressed to ancestors incarcerated for anti-colonial revolt. Raha considers what the rise and fall of these carceral islands can teach us about contemporary abolitionist struggles, from a transfeminist perspective.
Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to the everyday of marginalised lives, histories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, of humans and the more-than-human. She works through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance. With Mijke van der Drift, Nat co-edits Radical Transfeminism zine, and is currently co-authoring a book Trans Femme Futures: An Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (forthcoming, 2024).
Co-commissioned by TULCA and Edinburgh Arts Festival 2023.
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise
Curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais
3 - 19 November 2023
Galway, Ireland
Access: A step free venue. A single accessible parking space across the road from Nuns Island Theatre. Accessible toilet facilities available. The performance will be live captioned.
Image: Nat Raha, Bass Rock, courtesy of the artist.