Subsurface activity: Thawing Gently

Chantel Foo is a Chinese Singaporean artist and performer based in London. Chantel’s practice is anchored in performance, working with movement, writing, Real Game Play and livestreams. Nodes of thought include: slippages, residual presences, selfhood and glitch spaces. They found and run Studio Lotusroot.

Isabella Kajiwara is a Japanese, British, and American writer, community organiser and prison abolitionist, rooted in London but committed to an internationalist praxis. Some of their multifaceted contributions to justice movements include workshop facilitation, storytelling, and supporting people in detention who are oppressed by borders and prisons. With collective care as their guiding principle, they organise with ESEA Sisters, a community of East and Southeast Asian women, trans, non-binary and genderqueer people creating spaces for healing through joy and resistance on local/global, micro/macro scales.

Lucinda Chua is an artist and musician who approaches music making as language. A friend, supporter and collaborator to Studio Lotusroot; they will perform live with cello and electronics, with the intention of holding space within sound for all attendees.

Valeria Radchenko is a multidisciplinary artist, singer-songwriter and music producer. They play with the fusing of genres and mediums, weaving personal narratives with speculative fiction to dream new worlds. Exploring sound as a form of touch, they are particularly interested in the emotional potential of electronic music – how we can work with technology to express what is human.

Studio Lotusroot extends from Chantel’s movement work, with a focus on embodied healing through movement. Studio Lotusroot dreams of a webwork of care, to be a space for embodied encounters and somatic healing through movement, facilitated by Chantel, to foster a commitment of care that tends to our bodies. Studio Lotusroot sees the queer body-sponge as a modality of moving through/with/towards life.