Rosewater on hot coals, baking bread, peaceful ashes, bay leaves on a misty morning

Join us on Saturday 7 November at 4pm for A Ritual for Playing in the Rain the Way We Used To, a ritual song with Sarah Shin.

Over a six-month participation residency at Auto Italia, artist Rose Nordin has worked with Brighter Futures, a group of young migrants supported by Praxis and Kazzum Arts, to explore how memories of people and places can be held in scent. With writer Sarah Shin joining for part of this work, the group’s individual memories became a collective bank of vocabulary, from which they wrote poems that weave fragments of stories into unexpected connections.

These poems have now been transformed into a new song, composed and sung by Bianca Chu, Sammy Lee, Sarah Shin and Flora Yin-Wong with Rose Nordin. The song shares its name with the exhibition, a title drawn from the group’s poems, and carries forward the themes that ran through the residency: joy and freedom, ritual and ceremony, love and care. Audiences are invited to be part of the ritual, expanding the collective bank of vocabulary with their own.

This event is part of Auto Italia’s 2026 Participation Artist-in-Residence Programme, in which artist-in-residence Rose Nordin works with young artists from Brighter Futures.

The programme is generously supported by The National Lottery Community Fund and Arts Council England.