The programme explores artistic practices of ‘world-building’ and ‘rehearsal’, which enact or perform more just and liveable worlds.
The Rehearsals programme will commission a series of artists whose work imagines new worlds or ways of living, from more equitable healthcare systems, to climate solidarity networks, to embodied forms of justice. This programme connects to research happening across º¬Ðß²ÝÊÓƵ, from the Health Humanities research group to the Institute of Advanced Studies, to researchers in English, Sociology, Politics, Architecture, and more.
This year, Radar is working with two artists and one artist duo: Dani Admiss and Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Nat Raha, and Helene Kazan. In partnership with the Institute of Advanced Studies, Radar is also hosting artist Cassie Thornton as a visiting fellow this November. The programme will launch with a series of events running from 4-15 November 2024.
The first few events of the programme are as follows:
- Tuesday 5 November: Rehearsals (for a world we can live in): Programme Launch Event
- Monday 11 November: Workshop: The Hologram
- Tuesday 12 November: Care in the Ruins: Roundtable Discussion
Details of upcoming events will be updated on Radar’s events page.
More information about the project commissions can be found below:
Dani Admiss and Luiza Prado: The World is a Mill
‘The World is a Mill’ (TWM) is a pilot project bringing together artists and communities collaborating in recipe mapping and food sharing workshops, community cooking, and peer learning. Together with Radar, Admiss and Prado will develop TWM towards a long-term project, initially rooted in the Midlands and expanding to encompass further partnerships. 
Worldwide, the climate and nature emergency is creating new states of existential precarity. In response the artists ask, how do we think, feel, and sense our way through extinction, instability and displacement to find new conceptions of solidarity, collectivity and belonging? TWM aims to articulate and experiment with the types of coordination and synergy needed between local, dispersed and displaced communities in climate breakdown. Alternative forms of recipe exchange, food sharing and food as cultural preservation are used to explore how the experimental knowledge and sensorial methodologies of growing and eating can contribute to climate action. 
Nat Raha: Liberation Laboratory
Centring transfeminist, queer and abolitionist practices and approaches to mutual aid and collective worldmaking, the liberation laboratory intends to connect people involved in LGBTQI+ mutual aid projects, wider community members, and performance artists. Adopting methods of live research and self-study, through public and closed discussions, knowledge sharing, hangouts and performance practices, the lab will function as a space made for comparing notes on approaches, practical methods and on infrastructures of collective support.   
The ‘Liberation Lab’ will also explore the relationship between queer performance practices and the ‘performance’ of collective worldmaking, by putting the two in dialogue with each other. Raha will link up with a range of activist groups, potentially in a few different cities, to foster the conditions of research and study.  The work is based on theoretical ideas from Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift’s book, ‘Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds’ (Pluto Press, 2024); and as part of the project, Nat will continue to develop an ongoing, reflective performance work, ‘solidarity & house’.   
Helene Kazan: Poetic Testimony
For Radar, artist Helene Kazan will conduct a poetic investigation into the modern geopolitics of cotton, grounded in the Midlands’ history of textile production. Kazan will undertake a series of research trips to the region, as well as connect to interdisciplinary practitioners at º¬Ðß²ÝÊÓƵ. The project will develop as a time-based audio-visual work sharing the discovery of the poetic investigative process.