Join us on Wednesday 10th December, 6–8PM for Blood and Spirit, a reading group and workshop with artist Joshua Woolford.

Bringing together questions around sound and the unseen, performance, colonial legacies, environmental crisis, activism, urban space and the built environment, the session invites participants to consider how anticolonial and anticapitalist strategies can shape artistic research and practice today.

Participants will explore movements across the Caribbean, France and the UK, including Marronage, Négritude and Chartism, alongside the work of artists and writers such as Katherine McKittrick, Ingrid Pollard and Octavia Butler, whose thinking calls for a radical reimagining of how we engage with structures of power.

This event is free to attend and will be held at Auto Italia.

Joshua Woolford is a transdisciplinary artist working across performance, sound, video, and installation. Joshua’s work is grounded in cultural research and their personal experiences of being a member of the queer Black Afro-Caribbean diaspora living in England. Through their practice, Joshua acknowledges and confronts experiences of violence, aggression, and misalignment prevalent within our socio-political landscapes by centering embodied knowledge, the ‘unseen’ and intuition as powerful and disruptive states which provoke critical dialogues.

Woolford graduated with an MA from the Royal College of Art (Contemporary Art Practice) and Cum Laude from the Design Academy Eindhoven (Media and Culture) and is currently a LAHP funded PhD candidate across Slade and the Royal College of Art with a project exploring anticapitalist and anticolonial resistance and performance. They were the 2023-24 Interpretation Artist in Residence at Tate and a New Contemporaries 2023 Artist. In 2024 Joshua was the recipient of an Arts Council DYCP grant, and the a-n Artists Bursary.

Notable exhibitions include live performances at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, as and exhibitions and performances at various institutions across London, such as HOME by Ronan Mckenzie, Somerset House, Black Cultural Archives, the V&A, Gucci flagship store, Camden Art Centre, Tate Britain and Whitechapel Gallery.

In addition to their artistic practice, Joshua lectures at UAL (London College of Communication & Central Saint Martins) and the Royal College of Art (School of Architecture) and takes on design commissions.