Flatness is a long-running ‘site of resistance’ (Dr Sylvia Theuri) inspired by the expanses of the screen, the outdoors and community networks. Read more about us.
Our new book Queer Diasporic Futurity contains a collective call to restore loving connections to the body and to nature. The collection makes visible a vital network of practices embodying an ethics of sustainability, accessibility and futurity. This limited edition publication and special launch poster is available to buy for £15 + p&p. Proceeds from the sale of QDF go towards relief efforts in Palestine and Lebanon.
Contributions to QDF include:
• A foreword by Evan Ifekoya;
• Introductions by Flatness founder, Shama Khanna;
• Reflections on Earthlove within urban settings and facilitating the Community Apothecary by Rasheeqa Ahmad;
• An in-depth discussion on ‘Queering Economics’ organised by Decolonising Economics with guests Evan Ifekoya, Amardeep Singh Dhillon and June Bellebono addressing queer infrastructures of care, redistribution of power and spiritual relationships to money;
• A divination essay by Daniella Valz Gen probing questions of sustainability and growth within practice;
• A response to the entangled temporality of diasporic life by Aditi Jaganathan;
• A wellbeing spell by Adam Farah;
• And a scorebook tenderly exploring introverted tomboy and transmasc sounds by Nat Lall.
QDF is published in partnership with not/nowhere artist workers’ co-operative and has been beautifully designed by Design Print Bind.
Place your order via paypal.me/QDFbyFlatness to receive a copy of our book for £17.70 (£15 + £2.70 UK p&p/ £22 including International p&p) along with any donations you’re able to make.
The process is a little clunky, but can be broken down into the following steps:
– First, choose the ‘send’ (not ‘request’) money option
– To ensure all your ££ comes to the fundraiser choose the ‘friends and family’ payment option. Or, if you wish to choose the ‘item or service’ option please add £1 to the cost of the book (i.e. £18.70 in total) to cover extra charges incurred.
– Lastly, add your address in the “What’s this payment for?” box. We will be in touch shortly to confirm your details for delivery. Much gratitude for your support.
Thanks to Art Workers For Palestine for sharing this documentation from the vigil for Palestinian artists held at Tate Modern on 26 November 2023. The Tate have made a statement in solidarity with Ukraine but are keeping silent about Gaza. Why?
Silence is violence. Denounce the ongoing violence of occupation. Cultural boycott of Israel and permanent ceasefire now.
Flatness is in grief and rage at the ongoing genocide in Palestine as well as the apartheid which evidently exists beyond national borders but in people’s minds too. See you on the streets each week in our thousands and in our millions until there is justice for Palestinians and all colonised peoples. We Are Many. Read the latest Radicle newsletter to find an accessible list of resources and reporters to follow.
Jack Jeans’s new ‘Bee Zine: Solitary:Solidarity’ with paintings by Ruzha Kazandjieva is now available as a free download and as a hand-bound, risoprinted zine. Follow the link to buy and we can send you a copy or head to Peckham Books while stocks last!
Bee zine: Solitary:Solidarity
Compiled by Jack Jeans with artwork by Ruzha Kazandjieva
Bee Zine: Solitary:Solidarity by Jack Jeans builds solidarity with solitary bees and private renters to protect biodiversity and improve living conditions. Where homeowners and honey bees are the only one prioritised, we all lose out.
The zine accompanies the bee homes Jack made and installed in Peveril Gardens after our Swap Shop in January. In the spirit of the zine, the ink and materials used mean the publication is fully compostable! Read more.
In June Flatness took part in the first Presse Books Fair, selling publications by contributors including Texta Queen, Mohammed Z. Rahman, Nat Lall, Steve & Samantha, 56a Infoshop, Beth Bramich and, alongside our book Queer Diasporic Futurity (QDF), two brand new zines by Jack Jeans and Hannah le Feuvre and Ulijona Odišarija. Pavement Flowers by Mohammed Z. Rahman, QDF by Flatness and Bee Zine: Solitary:Solidarity compiled by Jack Jeans are available to buy or download from the site.
Plant Medicine of the City: A seasonal diary by Rasheeqa Ahmad. What new tastes and experiences beyond our comfort zone can transform our sense of what’s possible?
So pleased to host Ulijona Odišarija and James Lownes’ band Steve & Samantha at Presse Books to launch their new EP ‘Better is Better’ and celebrate the culmination of our residency at Forma and Peveril Gardens. Listen to their full EP on all streaming platforms including Bandcamp.
Thanks to everyone who made it to the programme we put together at FormaHQ and Peveril Gardens over the February half term. We appreciated your company defeating the Winter dank! Special thanks to contributors Ali Yellop, Design Print Bind, Ulijona Odišarija & Hannah Lefeuvre and Richard Court for being so generous with your time and sharing so much knowledge and inspiration.
Thanks to everyone who came to the swap shop and screening event at FormaHQ (documentation is up here). It was great to meet everyone and reflect on notions of value, redistribution and mutual care with you. There was a surplus of donations (thank you) but it was perhaps the smaller swaps of things that still had value for both swappers that were most 💫 in defeating capitalism ; )
Big thanks to filmmaker Tomás Fernandez Vértiz for your beautiful film and conversation (not to mention the warming drink of Mexican hot chocolate and Colombian sweets you brought for everyone), Southwark Notes for chatting about community activism around Elephant, and Jack Jeans for making the insect homes for Peveril Gardens and seed bombs for the swap.
We were overwhelmed by the response and look forward to seeing you again for events we’re planning during the half term break 14-18 February.
The Chiron Choir was formed on occasion of Dr. Hannah Catherine Jones’s exhibition ‘OWED TO CHIRON (The Wounded Healer) at Mimosa House in London at the end of last year. I was honoured to be invited to write about HCJ’s work in a text entitled ‘Vulnerability with Attitude (Overdue Dues)‘.
Thanks to Flatness contributor Joseph Walsh for this welcome throwback to the Summer and AssemblePlay’s Mini Festival of Play that we curated as part of the public programme for Brent Biennial 2022, ‘In the House of my Love’.
Thanks too to the playworkers and their loose parts, all the children and everyone who came along to Kilburn Grange Park to join us. Scroll down for ‘In the Curve’, another contribution by Joseph recorded during lockdown.
Flatness have just moved to Elephant and Castle to begin our Oasis residency at FormaHQ. Lasting until Spring 2023, the residency invites socially engaged practitioners to develop and deliver a cultural programme that strengthens the bridge between the newly developed FormaHQ (retrofitted into a studio building, cafe, events space and public garden from 1960s garage block and podium on top) and its local communities, creating meaningful connections that have social impact and harmonise with the organisation’s activities.
Brent Biennial 2022 Public Programme by Flatness
Flatness curated a public programme of talks, workshops, activities for kids, screenings and a conference for Brent Biennial ‘In the House of my Love’. Lifting the conversations from QUEER DIASPORIC FUTURITY off the page, the programme gathered together community-building practices that centre on creativity, healing, listening, showing up for others and asking bold questions, in what can otherwise be a dizzying political environment. Events included a misery medicine walk, a day of action Against the Hostile Environment (with QDF contributors Amardeep Singh Dhillon, Beth Saha and Daniella Valz Gen), a series of community listening events, an event on housing called Homes for Queers (with Adam Farah), and kids’ events with misery and AssemblePlay. The intention was to nurture connections that can help to find one’s voice and feel supported in taking a stand against hostility.
Thanks to all who joined us!
The documentation above is of a misery medicine workshop held in July showing the Pavement Flowers zine made for the event by Mohammed Zaahidur Rahman. Photography by Kes-Tchaas Eccleston.
‘Queer Diasporic Futurity’ edited by Flatness
The book launch at Studio Voltaire at the start of July was a shy success and we’re happy that copies of Queer Diasporic Futurity have since found homes at addresses from Wales to Naarm (so called Melbourne). This limited edition publication and special launch poster is available to buy for £17 incl. p&p (payment details follow below). Copies are also available at Category is Books and Good Press in Glasgow, Manchester Metropolitan Uni Library and Presse, BOOKS, Koenig Books at Whitechapel Gallery and the Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths in London. Get in touch if you have any access requests, or if you would like to order one of four remaining bundles of TextaQueen’s ‘Learn your ACABs’, Nat Lall’s ‘Scores for Sissy Bois’ and QDF for £30 + p&p.
Queer Diasporic Futurity, commissioned by SAFEDI and developed in partnership with not/nowhere artist workers’ co-operative, marks 9 years of the Flatness curatorial platform for artists’ moving image and network culture, bearing witness to the decentralised QTIBPOC (Queer, Trans and Intersex identified Black and People of Colour) networks it has come to form a part of.
QDF contains a collective call to restore loving connections to the body and to nature. The collection makes visible a vital network of practices focused on sustainability, accessibility and futurity. QDF reflects on the holistic conditions the book’s contributors are creating in order to disassociate less from the exhaustion of everyday overstimulation and disappointments, and to begin to identify new, potentially transformative felt connections to build upon.
Plant Medicine of the City: a Seasonal Diary by RASHEEQA AHMAD (Hedge Herbs)
Rasheeqa is a Herbalist practicing in London with plant medicine, supporting people in her community with herbs and the healing they can offer. In the coming year she will be guiding us through the seasonal energy changes she observes and works with – both in the herb gardens she runs and growing wild around the city – in this special realtime plant life diary for Flatness. Watch Rasheeqa’s introduction to the series here.
Interview with DANIELLE BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY
Danielle discusses types of gatekeeping which determines value and erases the presence of Black people from archives, technologies and markets. Through her work she seeks to create a foundation for other Black Trans people to build on top of, including making archives where they are not only centred but embedded in the fabric of her coding. We also speak about her non-linear approach to technology reviving technologies to repurpose them for use by Black Trans people. And how she emphasises accessibility in her work and the importance of setting out terms and conditions as a way of holding people (and gatekeepers) to account.
The physical and digital and the spaces in-between by Dr SYLVIA THEURI (image courtesy estate of DONALD RODNEY)
Following Ten Million Dinner Parties by NISHA RAMAYYA
hair folder (video) by ULIJONA ODIŠARIJA
In The Curve by JOSEPH WALSH
Lockdown performance by TOM RICHARDS
The blessing of the Pisces Rising by NAT LALL
There is a high chance that astrology is a load of bollocks but there are a few things I get out of it. Actually one or two things are very useful.
The first is a sense of belonging because for some reason astrology is a predominant part of lesbian culture. Don’t ask me why. I don’t really care why. Why not? I mean I was forced to study Christianity for a lot longer…lmao.
Anyway, I also find that regular horoscopes give me a sense of focus. That’s super useful for me. I find a lot of truth, or at least correlation, in my chart.
Notebook Score #2: The line of the hand throws the mind out of the body reading by HANNAH SATZ
This notebook practice represents a release of thought and feeling, in some sense counter to the control or fixity of Writing. It’s flighty – the motion of writing long-hand is another way of running – but the connection from hand to gut is also grounding; it earths me. I read fragments from the end of February to the end of April 2020, here and there; paragraphs, lines, or words from flicked through pages, self-censoring as I stumble and flow. It is meant, even in its inward-looking, to be a form of opening, an offering.
Peaceful in the rain in the order by DAN WALWIN
Interview with TEXTAQUEEN
… There are so many more south Asians I’ve connected with whose lives are on tangents to mine here in London than back ‘home’. I’ve felt part of a cluster of brown and black artists working with care and integrity here, and have made more intergenerational connections. My parents migrated, and I was born, not long after the White Australia policies ended, there aren’t elder second generation POC migrants and I have very few peers my age at my intersections. …
… A decolonial practice for me is, during the creative process, letting go of imagining the white liberal audience reaction to the work and keeping present in mind myself and an audience who will feel empowerment through the work.
rehana zaman
MEDICATED SUMMERS / BENEFITS TRAP / ENDS PORTALS two-part momentational sequence consisting of a short video and an image dump PDF file by ADAM FARAH
TAYLOR LE MELLE responds to MEDICATED SUMMERS / BENEFITS TRAP / ENDS PORTALS by Adam Farah
lucy clout
An Analog for Listening by NIKHIL VETTUKATTIL
nat lall
dan walwin
Creating safer spaces
The web is not a neutral space. From its beginnings as a US defence initiative to improve communication with soldiers in remote places, through to the privileged, racial capitalistic understanding of freedom and ‘making the world a better place’ the Californian ideologists who continue to structure and profit from it maintain. There has been an equally long history of artists and technologists critiquing this version of its development which Flatness builds upon.
Flatness is working on becoming a safer and accessible space free from racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, classism, casteism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, or hatefulness. Let us know if there are ways we can do this better.
Subscribe to the Flatness newsletter for project updates.
Donations are always welcome for supporting the project.
Web design & programming by Gailė Pranckūnaitė & Andrius Zupkus.
All texts, works and images either belong to the artist, author or photographer named or are licensed under the terms of this CC 4.00 certificate.
Comments
Thank you Joe, your fabulations mean so much, quelling doubt and opening up new boulevards of possibility. Here’s to the clunk of Flatness and the humble carrier bag.
🥰 ossified haha
Likin what you sayin. I am not worried about very few people reading this, I actually prefer it. So as this ossified totem pole of writing (as opposed to the supple buoyancy of insta) am not so much thinking of the online community to excel an art career, but more the tending of community/commons. I think you string it together nicely – there’s us two psychic connection when we have danced round in Bonnington cafe, then there is Flatness website which is not about recreating that. Flatness is like the models in Robert Bressons films: minimal gesture, pointing to something beyond the models. Nice to fabulate Flatness a bit with you.
I’ll have to print out all the comments for you so it’s easier to rifle through! There are some good ones at the start. Will organise another group convo on here soon.
It feels like we connect over music, food and sacred sites for us like The Elephant and The Bonnington Cafe. Spaces which invite improvisation through processes of listening and tasting. And that dance you we do around the tables at Bonnington. It’s a tacit form of experience which has very little to do with this flat space where it’s hard to put across intonation or a squeeze of the arm. Which makes me think of Bresson and the ways he mobilised the screen to conjure this which folx like you Lucy, Adam and Dan do so sublime-ly.
That’s so nice what you pulled out from your laundry bag. That moment of reflection or unlearning you had sounds both really spacious and intimate at once. The defences our parents have had to muster are deep.
The clunk clunk of Flatness, yes! You’re right this space can feel a lot more still than IG, which I appreciate. From the basic analytics I gather, I know ppl are tuning in. And didn’t it feel urgent when the site went down briefly on Monday! So we’re very much live.
The White Pube are probably the best thing to happen to criticism perhaps ever. Their web presence ensures they have max visibility but for most people this is unattainable. I guess it’s hard for pre-social media practices to get on board with the Social they talk about so expertly here: https://www.thewhitepube.co.uk/how-to-get-an-exhibition
although they do close the piece saying they hope for a IG-free future ..
I’ve also been trying to develop a Patreon subscription page for the site which I’m also finding tricky – the sponsorship tiers are not very Flatness!
I have a question about Flatness.eu as online artist network. The comments section is clunky compared to FB or Insta. It doesnt have threads on conversation, you can’t easily scroll back to older conversations to re-visit. I am getting a feeling of our conversation as pinning it up on a public notice board in the local square, someone may or may not read it. I am interested in your response to comparing the streamline interface of instagram, to the clunk of Flatness in the space of online community. x
Your comment is carrier bag and -yes generative contradictions. I like your writing. Here is my laundry bag: When we were working together for my contribution, you said that you felt like you had to contain me but you also didn’t want to contain me. This went both ways, and such are relationships. It was an on-going listening, care, containing, chiming, as opposed to a straightforward delivery where we efficiently streamline our roles.
It made me think of recently helping my mum out with writing an essay. She is Chinese and her chinglish is broken up, abrupt, involves deciphering listening to her.
As I was correcting her essay, I got impatient with her, and kept cutting her short because her essay didnt flow smoothly and her explanation further baffled me. I realised the way I cut her short is how she is often dealt with in the UK and I was enacting that myself. I had to check myself, alleviate her stress, find patience.
I was thinking of Flatness.eu as this moment with my mum.
This feeling I’ve described below is a non-linear feeling, one of generative contradiction. Winning without appearing to – also very carrier bag, no Joe?
Hi Joe! Thank you for leaving this welcoming rug out for us, it’s much needed at the moment. And for your invitation to take our time. It feels like we’ve come through a lot in the past 5 weeks since the brutal murder of George Floyd, and with the virus continuing to spread.
We’re checking our privileges and complicities and drawing lines in the sand to mitigate against them. Now horizons have been opened up: there’s no ‘before’ to go back to. Although for me the feeling rn is like when you overexert yourself when you’re not quite recovered from something. A lot of desire but need to build up reserves again first. Carrier Bag theory comes into its own as the phallic statues are dismantled. Flatness absolutely hopes to frolic in the cereal bowl with you and everyone to celebrate soon.
Shama, in a previous comment I have said that in this Covid situation – a space has opened up. This space can be filled with Fascism or it can be filled with visions from the visionaries, so they need to not hide behind a curtain. I felt I was being a bit pushy on the visionaries here. I could coax you out onto a soft rug, where you could curl up or frolic. No pressure though! I’ll leave rug out. Take your time.
I want to ask you a about Flatness.eu as carrier bag. Is it wicker basket, tupperwear box, cereal bowl?
Tomorrow afternoon Flatness is pleased to be speaking as part of Agile Structures with artists from Cornwall and Devon who are ‘re-visioning practice and behaviour in the shadow of the pandemic’. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/agile-structures-networking-in-isolation-tickets-109606754754
And this conversation identifies its agents, the police and language itself – the idea of ‘looting’
https://jewishcurrents.org/stealing-away-in-america/
We can’t end white supremacy if we’re not taught how it began
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/324092