Staff picks: the online programme

Our online programme for AND Festival 2021 traversed borders, oceans and format, platforming rich conversations through interactive gameplay, round table discussions, film and much more to make this year’s festival a truly hybrid experience.

Tadeo, Sophia and George from our Online Production team collectively unpack their top picks from the 2021 programme, highlighting the breadth of exploration of the festival themes from invited artists and speakers, a staggeringly diverse interrogation into the current political and cultural landscapes we exist within, during a global pandemic.

Resurface: THE WORLD HAS CHANGED: YOU WILL BE JUDGED
In June, we were transported across Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s digital galaxy in her fantastical, interactive, gamified performance THE WORLD HAS CHANGED: YOU WILL BE JUDGED. The audience found out how they fit into this new world, with their choices – past and present – determining how the story unfolded. Danielle forges a metaverse that archives Black trans experience, weaving animation, sound, performance and video games to retell trans stories.

Deeper: Hakeem Adam & Maxwell Mutanda
Marking the opening of this year’s festival, Curator at Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery, Mariama Attah, connected with artists Hakeem Adam and Maxwell Mutanda in a conversation to go beneath the surface of their new work One-Fifth of the Earth’s Surface. They discussed themes of ownership and cartography, from exploring maps as instruments of power to activating the Atlantic Ocean as an archive of memories.

Deeper: Radio Ensemble
We connect across the oceans with Indonesia-based curator Ignatia Nilu as part of Radio Ensemble, in an exploration of sound design, sculptural sound objects and long distance collaboration. The project brought together UK and Indonesian sound artists and composers Daniel Caesar, Jonathan Hering, Daniel Thorne and Harsya Wahono to perform as an ensemble across parallel time and space.

Resurface: Sustaining Uncertainty
Cultural Producer Siddharth Khajuria (Barbican Centre) brought together a panel of cultural practitioners – Razia Jordan, Jonathan May and Penny Rafferty – in a reflective and open-ended conversation, to explore how we can nurture and protect space for the unknown within arts institutions. Talking us through their own experiences, the panel discussed the future of art ecosystems and how cultural producers and artists can protect this fragile system of unknowns. A useful toolkit of reading resources is also available as part of this conversation.

Resurface: Suzanne Dhaliwal
Artist and Activist Suzanne Dhaliwal shared her practice as a climate justice creative, to expose the webs of corporate and financial power that have led to the current crisis, and discussed how cultural and artistic practices can shape the ways in which we conduct activism. In this talk, Suzanne explored how the climate crisis intersects with the ongoing colonial exploitation of crucial ecosystems, from the Athabasca Delta in the Canadian Tar Sands to the Niger Delta.

AND Festival 2021 took place online, on docklands and on the water from Thursday 27 May – Sunday 11 July 2021. Radical artists, critical thinkers and curious audiences – local and remote – traced the entangled flows of shipping routes, oil refineries, chemical industries, recycling plants and energy systems from these ports, and unearthed environmental impacts on our ways of living.

Explore the full programme in our archive, and watch or listen back to some of our online events here.