Studio Lenca

As a queer member of the Latinx diaspora, Studio Lenca’s work is focused on notions of knowledge and visibility. He works with performance, video, drawing and object making and often starts through memories, activism or underpinned by different forms of praxis. He work’s under the name of ‘Studio Lenca’ as ‘studio’ refers to a space for experimentation and a place that is constantly shifting. Lenca refers to his ancestors of his native El Salvador.

Latinx UK Okay?

Studio Lenca will present 5 Latinx UK artists in a series of curated video works. The pandemic has deepened our distance from family and culture but for most Latinx artists displacement is normal. This series strives to reveal Latinx narratives often hidden in the UK. See how these artists navigate distance from the ones they love and their homelands through their complex practice.

Sara Trillo

Sara Trillo is a visual artist based in East Kent exploring liminal spaces and ancient settlements, investigating spaces that have disappeared from contemporary maps. She makes sculptural pieces using material uncovered from these sites, and writes narratives based on research into their layered histories, fusing old mythologies with contemporary issues. Many recent projects have invited audience participation, including recreating a forgotten rush-bearing procession on Romney Marsh, and excavating mysterious buried artefacts on Margate beach.

Deer Lines

Trillo is currently working on a new project leading walks following sections of the Cursus Cerve/Deer Line, a boundary line that historically divided Thanet between Westgate and Minster. It was formed, in myth, by a saint’s deer running across the island. The walks will incorporate stories and processional objects inspired by the Thanet landscape and the deer legend, leading the audience between sites connected with the narratives, and in the spirit of a pilgrimage, rewarding participants with a unique memorial token.

Helga Fannon

Helga Fannon is an Icelandic-British moving image artist. She makes films that draw from her own disparate family histories, creating tender and often beguiling links between these and other narratives, both found and imagined. Working from an expanding collection of voice, performance and text material, her current film practice explores questions of performativity through playful stagecraft combined with visual illusions whilst exploring memory as a creative act of personal reinvention.

This memory won’t last

For this project Fannon is working from an archive of family photos recovered from a stash of negatives that had remained forgotten for over 35 years. It will be a film about how we are shaped by memories, and about memories' power of re-enactment. It will be a slippery narrative composed in an unremitting, continuous tone, devouring and re-imagining fragments of the past as it goes, all the way to the present image of life.

Matt Merritt

As a writer Matt Merritt's previous work includes Alan - a short story published in the Songs For The Elephant Man anthology by Mantle Lane Press. Teachersaurus - a podcast drama produced by Frequency Theatre is available on their website. Flick to Kick, Matt's first stage play, was commissioned and produced at the Hotbed Festival by Menagerie Theatre Company at the Junction, Cambridge. Wild Horses,  a two-minute TV documentary was broadcast on the BBC South East news.

The Beginner's Guide To Being Arrested

A full length play/drama currently in development. A Beginner's Guide To Being Arrested is a new piece of writing, based on a real life experience.

A victim of crime is wrongfully arrested. Continuing budget cuts to the police and legal system have led to a Britain where evidence disclosure failures are common and incidents are often inadequately investigated. It means those responsible for upholding the law can easily make serious mistakes. If they can be so  careless before ruining an innocent life,  how can they be trusted to keep us safe and uphold justice? 

Anna Braithwaite

Anna Braithwaite is a Folkestone-based composer/performer and one half of the infamous cabaret duo ShooShooBaby. Since 2014, she has been focusing on writing and devising music theatre shows for actor/musicians using verbatim text to explore issues including mental health, gentrification and heritage. She has been composer-in-residence at Chatham Historic Dockyard and Quarterhouse, Folkestone and her work has been heard on BBC Radio 3, Resonance FM, Radiophrenia and in venues across the UK.

Eastbrooke’s Adaptation

In 2016 Braithwaite wrote a short chamber opera using verbatim text taken from interviews with a woman who has early-onset dementia.

“The 1927 bursary offers me the opportunity to revisit this piece and create a full length version suitable for touring to rural venues. With the help of dramaturg Emma Bernard and 1927's Suzanne Andrade, I want to expand the narrative elements of the piece and let myself grow into a directorial role.”