You can watch Visions As Our Exile here at 6pm on Friday 29 January.

This Friday (29 January), Visions as Our Exile launches – a free exhibition of work produced by emerging audio-visual artists for one evening.

The new works are products of Open Source Collaborations, a virtual arts project launched in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic by the Albany and Foreign Body Productions. The programme connects artists with mentors in order to help them realise new ideas and work across different media. This new community of artists has met weekly via regular video calls to collaborate and develop their work. The second round of the programme, which ran across November and December, saw new work produced in the mediums of radio play, short film, performance poetry, dramatic monologue and music.
The exhibition will showcase the results of this collaboration, with five original works spanning subjects including migration, mental health, activism, the meaning of home and a psychedelic sea shanty from five emerging audio-visual artists.
Project Leader, Luke Kulukundis said: “These pieces aspire to create a sense of hope and ambition for artists and audiences alike; that we can still form new communities, we can still create ambitious work that can transcend our reality whilst taking a lot from the process, no matter how remote and virtual it needs to be.”

We recently spoke to the five artists who took part in this round of the project and feature in the exhibition to find out about their works and their experiences of this virtual mentorship…

Jessica Bailey
Project: It May Never Happen
Mentors and collaborators: Matty Mancey-Jones and Jacqueline Lipman
Jessica is a playwright, director and lecturer based in London. She has directed work both her own and at schools and venues such as the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and the HighTide Festival and her work is often female-leaning, dealing with controversial or Neuro-Divergent themes.

Her project is a short film and monologue which aims to explain and raise awareness of OCD whilst putting the audience in the leading role:
“I thought carefully about an idea or an experience that wouldn’t work in theatre, and instantly thought of my experiences with OCD. From, there, the idea of the discordant audio and visual came to me quickly and I was so pleased to get the opportunity to share this experience, and shed light on the stigma of OCD from an insider perspective.”

Heloise Thual
Project: The Secret Anti-Capitalistic Diary of Korinne K Peterpot
Mentors and collaborators: Louis Grace and Will Stevens
Héloïse is a writer who spent almost three years associated with Playwright’s Studio, Scotland. First as a Mentored Playwright in 2014 mentored by Clare Duffy. In 2016, she was a recipient of a New Playwrights Award under the mentorship of Alan McKendrick and in March 2018, her play The Bug In The Cup was performed at the Theatre Royal Dumfries.

Her project is an audio monologue introducing Korinne K. Peterpot, a young anti-capitalist activist who wishes to once and for all destroy capitalism:
“Witnessing the amazing craft of my two collaborators/mentors was inspiring. I absorbed a lot of information and learnt the more practical part of producing a project – a part I normally remain a bit distant to. On this occasion, I had my hands in the mud (or clay) and it felt very pleasurable.”

Tommy Hearne
Project: Lowlands
Mentors and collaborators: Charles Stooke
Tommy has been playing music his entire life, after discovering folk music as a teenager. After gigging around London and beyond with folk-rock band The Northern Heights for a number of years, Tommy has now launched his solo work, combining sea shanties with electronic and psychedelic influences.

Lowlands is a folk composition written about the loss of Tommy’s parents, Phil and Nita Hearne, at the beginning of 2020. It is a modern sea shanty with psychedelic influences, and includes a spoken word section performed by Dean Williamson:
“Going forward, I plan to continue developWing this piece as part of a larger body of work. This process has been an invaluable experience, setting me off in a new and exciting musical direction.”

Mo’min Swaitat
Project: Stones In Hand
Mentors and collaborators: Luke Kulukundis and Amy Douglas-Morris
Mo’min is a UK-based Palestinian theatre and film maker who trained at the Freedom Theatre and LISPA. He has directed and acted in numerous productions both in Palestine and abroad. With several theatre film and music projects currently in development, Momin is also an electronic music DJ and vinyl collector and one of the creative team behind Arab artists’ collective Sarha Collective.

Stones in Hand is a surreal short film which draws on the artist’s experiences as a Palestinian Bedouin who moved from the West Bank to London and their memories of a childhood spent between weddings and intifadas (popular uprisings):
“(The mentors) supported my writing process and vision for the film at every step of the way as this was a very personal work and went above and beyond to lend their expertise and to offer ideas and encouragement whenever a challenge presented itself.”

Ben Woodward
Project: Ben Woodward
Mentors and collaborators: Rory Edmonds
Ben Woodward is a performance poet and labour activist from Oldham, Greater Manchester. His work focuses on public transport, his feelings and the casualised alienation of modern employment.

There is a short poetic-visual anthology charting a young man’s return to the foggy moorland wilderness he grew up alongside, and the people he left behind with it:
“I knew I wanted to make a film about being out of work with some poems at home. Rory (R17) came to the project with fantastic energy. We rented a car and drove up to the towns and hills, read poems, explored memories and the territories that formed them.”