elisabeth efua sutherland

Acts of Witnessing sharing at Tyne Theatre & Opera House.

Elisabeth Efua Sutherland comes from a background in theatre and dance. She is concerned with layered colonial histories, following bodies through different geographies and spaces by diving into images, texts, maps, landscapes, and traces of feet and where they once trod. 

Her research is driven by a desire to map stories, bodies and mythologies, and to examine the visibility (or lack of) and curation of black and African histories. She explores the power relationships of our past to our future; and the idea of custodianship of people, narratives, culture, history, and the future.

Elisabeth is one of the artists taking part in Contested Desires: Constructive Dialogues, a programme exploring the problematic legacy of European colonialism through artistic production and exchange. She is the founder of Terra Alta, an artist-led performing arts space in Accra, Ghana.

While in Newcastle, Elisabeth immersed herself in local history - mapping interconnecting stories of black and African people who visited the city or made it their home. Drawing on local archives, architecture, walking tours and sites of remembrance, she started to explore the possibilities of creating an embodied map of black experiences located in the city. And in doing so, explored the politics of visuality, and the legacies of extraction, materiality, wealth, displacement and coloniality.

In the process of research with collaborators and communities, and the presentation of work in progress, connection and community come into being - where stories and narratives are shared and told again, offering an alternative to those withheld, silenced and discarded by colonialism. This is further grounded by Elisabeth’s performance and body based work, which with the shared experience, gives a place for black lives of the past to be ever entangled, abundant and experienced in lived culture today.

Images: Elisabeth Efua Sutherland in another of her pieces, Acts of Witnessing sharing at Tyne Theatre & Opera House. Photo: Luke Waddington