The Showroom | Poet Belinda Zhawi presents a poetry and sound set

For the Collective Intimacy live programme, Belinda Zhawi, as Ma. Moyo presented SOUTH X SOUTH EAST. This work explores migration when one is young and interrogates what it means to forge identities based on geography. What it means to have more than one home and further exploration of what home means. The aim of the project is to explore the emotional landscape of these seismic shifts and how they can affect a person in their later life when thinking about identity. SXSE aims to explore loss and mourning of home or geographies through the use of poetry, vocalisation and music.

The works featured in this projects are field recordings and original works with musical contributions from harpist, Marysia Osuchowska and Caleb Azumah Nelson.

Image: Prada

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Belinda Zhawi is a Zimbabwean born writer, sound artist & educator currently based in London. Her work explores Afro-diasporic research & narratives; how art & education can be used as intersectional tools. She was the 2016/17 Institute of Contemporary Arts Associate Poet, is the 2019 Serpentine Galleries’ Schools Artist in Residence & co-founder of, literary arts platform, BORN::FREE. Belinda is the author of Small Inheritances (ignitionpress, 2018) and micro-pamphlet, South of South East (Bad Betty Press, 2019)

Belinda Zhawi, poetry and sound set, performance documentation, The Showroom, London, 2019. Courtesy of Prada

This programme took place within Theaster Gates's installation Black Image Corporation presented by Prada, The Vinyl Factory, and The Showroom. Collective Intimacy is inspired by Gates’s ethos of collaboration and The Showroom’s commitment to togetherness and communal knowledge, taking on multiple trans-located narratives of the current Black experience as a point of departure for a cosmopolitan worldview. In response to Gates’s reactivated spaces in Chicago and how his socially engaged projects enable communities to connect and grow, Collective Intimacy aimed to create a new space for people to gather, listen, converse, and contemplate amongst a fusion of art, design, music, and everyday life.

Black Image Corporation presented distinct spaces creating a myriad of possibilities for collective engagements, featuring an installation of Gates’s art objects, furnishings, and new films that capture the methodologies of urban renewal and community activation founding his practice. Pieces from Chicago imbued with powerful histories, uses, and localities resonated with distinctive lounge design from here in London – like a love letter between two cities, under the roof of a new House. Taking place at both 180 The Strand and The Showroom, Collective Intimacy hosted interdisciplinary interventions by artists, musicians, designers, writers, thinkers, collectives and members of the public, who were all invited to distort notions of selfhood and togetherness in the spirit of creating a global community.