elisabeth efua sutherland

CONTESTED DESIRES: CONSTRUCTIVE DIALOGUES

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.

Elisabeth took part in ‘Contested Desires: Constructive Dialogues’, a programme facilitated by D6 in Newcastle, exploring the problematic legacy of European colonialism through artistic production and exchange.

While in Newcastle, Elisabeth immersed herself in local history, participating in one of African Lives in Northen Englands’ walks, learning of the North East Coast Exhibition of 1929 and Henry 'Box' Brown - a former enslaved person who performed at Newcastle's Music Hall as part of his anti-slavery tour across northern England.

These stories, along with inspiration from archives, architecture and sites of remembrance, formed a basis on which she explored possibilities for creating an embodied map of black experiences located in the city. In doing so, she explored the politics of visuality, and the legacies of extraction, materiality, wealth, displacement and coloniality. She presented her work in progress at Dance City, sharing it with collaborators and communities involved in her research.

In the process of research, 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.