Naomi Russell
Founder + Director Agora Now | Curator, producer, strategist
www.espacoagora.space
www.liquidbecomings.eu
My name is Naomi Russell, I’m a curator, producer and strategist, working internationally in the performing arts and interdisciplinary fields, including making work for unusual spaces: on land and on water.
In December 2023 I moved home to Suffolk, the place I grew up. I’d been living in Amsterdam for over a decade. I never imagined I’d return to the UK, let alone a small village near the sea in this peripheral place.
The decision was sudden. I’d sold my Amsterdam apartment, was two days away from signing the exchange documents to buy a small “herenhuis” in Rotterdam and had a plan to divide my time between there and Buenos Aires, both cities I feel at home.
I came back because my Mum was evicted from her second care home. She has severe Alzheimer’s. I knew when I made this decision it was as much an act of reconciliation with myself as it was for her. She has no clue anymore what day it is. She has hardly any words. She cannot remember what a fork is. She giggles, a lot. She recognises me, that I am part of her and she is part of me. She exists completely in the moment, no more no less.
Returning brings questions: what did I imagine my life would be when I left at 16? What memory of my formative years? Can I do what I did and be who I was? What’s real? Who am I? Who are we?
The week before I move into a small cottage in Yoxford, Agora Now, a network for artistic and social transformation that I founded in 2021, is unanimously awarded the commission by an international jury to curate the European Pavilion 2024 with Liquid Becomings: a radical artistic experiment exploring European identity through rivers, fostering reflection on belonging + the potential for shared futures. We sailed – on this raft – the Danube from Baja in South Hungary to the border of Serbia and Romania, the wild Vistula in Poland from Warsaw to Krakow, the industrial Rhine from Cologne to Rotterdam and the parched Tagus from Toledo ending with a 3 day public festival in Lisbon.
Our curatorial proposal drew inspiration from Chantal Mouffe’s Horizonal Agonism, Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble and Paul Preciado’s fierce and muscular essay The South Does Not Exist.
33 artists were resident on the boats, 9 artists commissioned to make work. A further workforce of 24 freelancers together with artists represented 19 nationalities. We sailed through 11 countries
We chose rivers not because of climate, but because we felt an urgency to turn our gaze to the perimeters, the less visible places, and put ourselves in a dynamic space of unknowing: precarious, vulnerable, unpredictable. An act of resistance to make time to experiment with what it means to think and feel together
By encountering fragility as part of the experience of art making, we wanted to have the courage to ask: What amongst ourselves do we share? How can we become a “we”?
Having moved back to be close to Mum, coupled with the rollercoaster of curating and producing Liquid Becomings I am fragile and on edge with the worst bout of insomnia I’ve ever experienced. The weeks before I sail the Rhine, I take Mogadon so not to disrupt the rest of my artist crew. Extraordinarily, once sailing I don’t need sleeping pills at all, despite storms and heavy rain.
In a text for our Lisbon festival programme I quote John Cassavetes. “There is something important in people, something that’s dying - the senses, a universal thing. We can’t agree on politics, but maybe we can agree on senses. We are dying of sadness. The whole world is dying of sadness. We are the enemy.”
I believe sadness and loss – collective and individual - is at the heart of all our current crises: climate, social, mental health, polarisation, isolation, impunity and violence.
We are here together close to the easternmost point in England, the periphery. Fragility is visible. Coastal erosion is real. The crumbling coastline in Hemsby and Happisburgh a
symbol for an environment in crisis and a world teetering on the edge of social breakdown and extreme events. Too many places with histories as vibrant hubs of marine and port industry and tourism are now places of deprivation, community isolation and democratic alienation.
And so, what now?
Part of my own metabolic reset is realising I have nothing to prove and everything to contribute. I don’t need to perform. Nor do any of you by the way. I am enough as I am. You are each enough as you are. How can this truth radically shift the imprint we make on each and every being we encounter: human, non-human? What gift or small gesture is made when there is nothing to prove? When we can be not do. Becoming Liquid, together.
I have become deeply drawn to wanting to make something here. I didn’t expect this. The land from which I am formed. The fierce sea I love. My Mum’s father drowned on a family holiday when she was 4 years old. There are photos of me with her in the water as a baby. I am part of her, and she is part of me. She made that gift out of immense trauma.
By here, I mean Suffolk and Norfolk – from Felixstowe (here) to King’s Lynn. I plan – I hope with some of you - to build a boat. A big boat (not a raft!). With room for everyone.
It will be the third hub of Agora Now (others are in Rotterdam and Buenos Aires). Nomadic, moving up and down the coast, made with many, it will travel the region and the world, hosting artist residencies, public programmes, civic dialogues, hangout space for young people, hopefully in time other enterprises –the foodbank, drop in for people with mental health challenges. An alternative cultural institution, made with people, made for now.
Learning from Liquid Becomings – which was incredible and had to be produced it in less than a year (commissioners, please don’t do this to independent artist consortiums!) –means we take it slow. A 10 year horizon. Together with Jon Baker, Karen Reilly, Jaka
Skapin and Melanie Wilson, and a host of amazing local artists and organisations, we just undertook a listening journey along the coast. Our first small step.
Coastal imaginaries bring many idiosyncratic and unpredictable elements, beautiful in their monstrosity In East Anglia agriculture, fishing, making, mysticism and dialect are under threat. They are the foundations of the identity of this place once connected by Doggerland to Scandinavia and Netherlands.
Karl Trosclair, a graffiti artist we met with during our listening journey in Great Yarmouth said, “I’d go fishing so I can reconnect with the sea. In the past everyone in this town had a relationship with the sea. It was a bridge not a barrier”.
I read a quote by Colette Pinchon Battle last week: “the climate crisis is not just environmental; it’s about who we love enough to save”. Moving home was because I believe everyone deserves dignity througout and especially at the end of their lives. My Mum. You. Me. Dignity to live, to love, to work, to relate, to hope. Dignity for the people we love and, too, (this is very important) the person we hate.
Finding ways to navigate futures of mutuality and plurality – imperfect and together –metabolic – utopic - seem to me so incredibly urgent. Artistic and performance practices: the intelligence of the embodied state: catalyse this unlike anything else.
I’d like to end with a question. Will you join in?
From our listening journey we will be creating a sound work, and want to tour it to all sorts of different spaces next year – village halls, community cafes, cultural venues, working clubs and pubs, boat yards – opening up Thinking Space for anyone who wants to join us, to co-imagine what this boat can be and what it can mean to different people. We need your help to open up spaces.
Please come and talk to me afterwards. It would be great to connect. Thank you for listening.