Once a month, we open our studio doors to create a space where our community can share work. We’ll be bringing together guest speakers whose own practices shed light and inspire action and learning around questions of what ecology as method is in practice, elaborating on concepts including “participation”, “improvisation” and “transcendence”. These sessions aim to be in dialogue with the other happenings of the studio, a responsive space in which those happenings emerge into gathering.
For our first session, on the 22nd of November, Writing the Self, we will explore and lean into Ecology as a way of seeing ourselves, and our connection to one another and to the world, through writing, research and archives. We will be interrogating human methods of self-preservation and healing, and intergenerational communication - exploring writing, research and archives. Through the lens of ecology as a method, archives become alive - embodied, evolving, decaying - a space that reaches across time in both acts of remembering and forgetting.
Guest Speakers:
Riham Isaac is a performance artist from Palestine, weaving together a range of artistic practices – acting, singing, dancing, and video – to explore new mediums of live performance and multidisciplinary arts. Through themes like gender, politics, resistance, societal dynamics and collective imagination, Riham explores narratives often overlooked. Challenging prevailing perceptions and embracing risk-taking to provoke meaningful dialogue and change within audiences.
In 2017, she co-directed ‘The Alternativity’ in Bethlehem alongside Danny Boyle and Banksy, a highly political yet playful show spotlighted in a BBC2 documentary. At the 2014 Qalandia International Biennale, Riham’s performance ‘Stone on Road’ symbolically encapsulated the ongoing Palestinian struggle on the streets of Ramallah. Riham also holds a Performance MA from Goldsmiths and occasionally lectures at universities in Palestine.
Recently, her solo performance “Another Lover’s Discourse” commissioned by Belfast International Arts Festival, captivated UK audiences and earned a nomination as the VAULT Festival 2023 show of the week. She has collaborated with institutions like the A.M. Qattan Foundation in Ramallah and the British Council in East Jerusalem, fostering artistic expression and social engagement within the community. Riham has also led theatre training programs, community projects, and made lasting contributions to the vibrant artistic landscape in Palestine and beyond.
Davina Quinlivan is the author of Possessions: A Story of Transformation in an Era of Precarity (Duckworth, 2026) and Shalimar: A Story of Place and Migration (Little Toller, 2022). She teaches Experimental and Fragmentary Memoir at the University of Bristol and is currently an Artistic Lead with an award-winning creative writing incubator funded by Arts Council England, illuminating diverse writing in the South West; she is also an AHRC-funded Story Fellow with StoryArcs. ‘Shalimar’ was specially selected to launch the new audiobook platform Spiracle Audio in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Best Creative Writing Book by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. \
Her creative non-fiction has been published with The Willowherb Review, Hinterland, Litro, The Clearing, Caught By the River, Writers Rebel and Quay Words (Literature Works). For several years, she ran the creative writing seminar series F: For Flanerie at The Freud Museum, London. Davina holds a PhD in Film from Kings College London (2010) and is also the author of Filming the Body in Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan: 2015) and The Place of Breath in Cinema (EUP: 2012). She is a research associate with The University of Exeter and an Honorary Fellow with Kingston University.