Harsh Light: Désirée Reynolds & Eelyn Lee
Wednesday 16 February, 7 – 8:30pm
Online (via Zoom)
Free & open to all
Our webinar series Harsh Light is returning in February!
Started during the first wave of Covid in 2020, Harsh Light is an online gathering space for practitioners and publics alike to parse out the ways we have been surviving these critical, changing times. All sessions are BSL interpreted.
Our speakers use Harsh Light as a platform to work through one or two more precise questions related to their practice, particularly ones that are connected to systemic challenges of public health, politics and Arts Council England’s strategy. We invite you to look back at our archive of conversations if you are interested in understanding the many different concerns and strategies that practitioners have articulated over the course of Covid.
As we shift from ‘pandemic vigilance’ back to so-called ‘normalcy’, Harsh Light hopes to continue surveying the social and cultural landscape by asking how art workers are feeling: what have we learned, if anything, during this unsettling period? And how do these new knowledges impact our aims, desires and opportunities?
For our first Harsh Light of 2022, we are inviting Sheffield-based Eelyn Lee and Désirée Reynolds, who will discuss their collaborative as well as individual work as an artist and writer respectively. As socially committed storytellers, their practices amplify forgotten and silenced narratives at the margins. The speakers will talk about the development of their film project, which is based on Désirée’s haunting short story ‘Born on Sunday, Silent’. Tying it to their shared interest in ‘retrieval’, they will explore what it means to look for traces in physical objects like photographs, documents and registries that make up a place like the Sheffield Archives. What is it like to encounter such fragments? And following cultural historian Saidiya Hartman’s lead, how might one attend to the ‘unsaid […] without committing further violence in my own act of narration?’ In other words, how does one tell impossible stories?
Eelyn Lee is an award-winning artist and filmmaker based in Sheffield. She has exhibited at Barbican, Tate Modern, National Portrait Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery as well as internationally in Paris, Berlin, Bogotá and Toronto. Eelyn’s practice combines collective research, devised theatre and filmmaking to create frameworks for ensembles of collaborators to work together. In 2016 she co-founded Social Art Network, an artist-led network, building agency in the field of art and social practice. In 2020 she was commissioned to make Casting Fu Manchu, a film exploring ‘yellow peril’ in response to the rise of COVID related ‘Asian hate’. Eelyn is currently developing her first narrative feature film.
Désirée Reynolds is a writer, editor and creative writing workshop facilitator living in Sheffield. She started her writing career as a freelance journalist for the Jamaica Gleaner and the Village Voice. Her stories are in numerous anthologies and her first novel ‘Seduce’ was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2013 to much acclaim. Committed to anti-racism and intersectionality, she draws on her experiences of these to make creative work. In 2020, she published two short stories with Dead Ink and Bloomsbury and Arachne Press. Désirée was the guest curator of the Black Women Write Now strand of 2020’s Off The Shelf Festival of Words and was longlisted for the BBC short story prize 2021.
Bloc Projects is proud to maintain a public programme that is free for everyone. However, attendees are encouraged to donate to the S2 Foodbank, who are carrying out essential work during this time. To donate either follow the link on our homepage or click the button below.
This programme of events has been generously supported by Arts Council England