Dear Colleagues,

We warmly invite you to join us at our next online FTT Research Seminar: Ancestry, Exhaustion and Environmental Destruction.


Speakers: Mojisola Adebayo and Mariana Cunha 


Date: 23 November, 16.00-17.30

Location: Zoom (online)

Sign up: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ftt-seminar-ancestry-exhaustion-and-environmental-destruction-tickets-459986260287


About this Event

The FTT Research Seminar Series is hosted by the University of Reading and puts research from scholars in Film, Theatre and Television into dialogue. This celebrates the exciting intersection of these fields within our department and seeks to support collaboration and conversation across Film, Theatre, and Television.

Each invited talk is around 25-30 minutes long and is followed by a participatory Q&A discussion. This seminar will be held online only.



Family Tree and STARS , Mojisola Adebayo

Mojisola Adebayo (playwright, performer, producer, director and Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Contemporary Performance, at Queen Mary, University of London), will read extracts from her latest play, Family Tree with a discussion about the research process, from and through community gardens in Berlin graveyards, to a former hospital in South London and petri dishes in science labs. This practice-as-research project is part of her current White Climate: Afriquia Literatures and Agri/cultural Practices research fellowship, at University of Potsdam, Germany. Family Tree, directed by Matthew Xia and produced by Actors Touring Company, opens premieres at Belgrade Coventry and Brixton House in March 2023 with a across England until May 2023. Mojisola will connect to her play STARS, which also deals with Black body, gender, sexuality and healing and opens in April 2023, with Tamasha Theatre Company and ICA (London), before a national tour. Please note that both plays deal with trauma.


Family Tree: it’s a play, a performance, a ritual, about human farming, farming humans, soil and the soul, seeds and cells, selling cells in prison cells prizing open, dividing, multiplying, multi-million incisions, incarcerations, extractions and experimentations – woman-child-man, in the lab, on the slab, in the land, the plantation womb and bred’ren bred for bread, planting and planning escape from living-dead, plotting from the plot to the pot but for the dread of night doctors, organ raiders, head drillers, cigarette smoking cowboys, cops with hands in pockets and the Klu Klux Klan; it’s about cancer and capital, capitalism as cancer, cervical carcinoma in chicken culture (and the culture of chicken), compost and re-composition, giving of veins given in vain, philosophizing the threshold of black pain, inhospitable hospitals, monitored monetary mortuaries, eugenic medical obscenities, Mississippi appendectomies and the bad blood between us at Tuskegee, not-to-mention sugar addiction affliction, disease dis-ease, fibroids, obesity, HIV, vitamin D-deficiency, genes in jeans and cotton fields, cotton buds, cotton sheets and the unremembered history of gynaecology, implements’ implications, dissecting dissections, fertilizing fertility slash secret sterilizations, speculums, scalpels, swabs of women slaves, taking us right up to today, corona virus and giving-a-fuck-or-not about climate change. It’s about shaking the plastic money tree and out-falling Covid-19 onto a world that cannot breathe without change and cannot breathe without trees, where a woman in some African heaven hears her grown son calling “Mama… Mama…”… and she floats down… like leaves to the ground… lifts his face from the dirt… and carries her baby home… no more suffocation, pollution, asphyxiation… but the right to cellular respiration. It’s about the original ‘extinction rebellion’ from the ‘wretched of the earth’, ethics of the earth, risking the earth, dying of whiteness, dying to whiteness to witness: burial as a form of gardening. See three women come running loosening their plaits and shaking their Afros free scattering seeds to sew soul food to eat. It’s about where life grows, where a woman breathes life into an inner floating soul, drinking in, sustained in the Orisha of women, sweet water and unlocked-down hairdressers. It’s about finding a route home through the roots of the tree they made on your back, the tree you hung from, the tree of your lungs, the tree in your womb, a family tree. It’s about nursing the nursery, curing creation, remedies and vaccinations against white supremacist racism. It’s about birthing revolution, raising redemption, finding yourself in the forest of futurity, the promise of immortality and the matter of black lives. Featuring: Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy (the unremembered victim heroes of plantation gynaecology at the hands Dr Sims - pulled down from his plinth); starring: three Black NHS nurses – Ain, Bibi and Lyn, calling on the names of Doreen Lawrence and Fannie Lou Hamer, vibing with Beyoncé and bowing to the wisdom of Toni Morrison. With a surprise appearance by… Oh and there’s a cameo by the Man from Marlboro and in the leading role, the everlasting Henrietta Lacks. Rest in peace! Rise in peace! Rise in Power!


Mojisola Adebayo (BA, MA, PhD, FRSL, FHEA) has been making theatre internationally for 30 years, from Antarctica to Zimbabwe. Mojisola’s own plays include Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey (Lyric Hammersmith), Muhammad Ali and Me (Ovalhouse), 48 Minutes for Palestine (Ashtar Theatre, Ramallah), Desert Boy (Albany Theatre), The Listeners (Pegasus Theatre), I Stand Corrected (Artscape, South Africa), The Interrogation of Sandra Bland (Bush Theatre), Wind / Rush Generation(s) (National Theatre) and Nothello (Coventry Belgrade). Publications include Mojisola Adebayo: Plays One and Plays Two (Oberon Books) and the co-written Theatre for Development Handbook (Pan Arts). Black British Queer Plays and Practitioners: An Anthology of Afriquia Theatre (Bloomsbury Methuen), co-edited with Lynette Goddard, is out in October 2022. Mojisola is a Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, a mentor, Associate Artist of Black Lives Black Words, AICRE, Pan Arts and the Building the Anti-Racist Classroom collective and an Honorary Fellow of Rose Bruford College. She is currently on a fellowship at University of Potsdam, Germany, commissioned by Counterpoint Arts and is a Writer-on-Attachment to the National Theatre (UK). Mojisola’s play Family Tree, won the Alfred Fagon Award for Best Play of 2021. Following work-in-progress performances at Greenwich and Docklands International Festival with ATC and Young Vic, Family Tree premieres at Belgrade Coventry and Brixton House, March 2023, (ATC). Her next play, STARS (Tamasha / ICA) premieres at ICA London in April 2023, before a national tour.

See mojisolaadebayo.co.uk for more.



Exhaustion and Healing: Re-enchantment in Latin American Films, Mariana Cunha (University of Westminster)


This presentation takes the notion of exhaustion (Deleuze, 1995) as a starting point to examine the ways in which a group of recent films from Latin America engage with the impacts of environmental destruction and the genocide of indigenous communities. The films I discuss address the afterlives of violence, extractivism, and colonialism through the fabulation of exhausted and diseased bodies and scarred landscapes. Nevertheless, beyond resorting to a mode of representation – fictional or documentary – whereby ecological and ethnic catastrophes are emphasised and denounced, I argue that these contemporary filmmaking practices offer new forms of storytelling. I will discuss the extent to which films such as Eami (Paz Encina, Paraguay, 2022), The Fever (A Febre, Maya Da-rin, Brazil, 2019), Black Lagoon (Laguna Negra, Felipe Esparza Peréz, Peru, 2019), and Tomorrow is a Water Palace (El mañana es un palacio de agua, Juanita Onzaga, Colombia) address the exhaustion of bodies and spaces by shifting epistemological paradigms. Through creatively reworking cosmologies and cosmovision of Amerindian thought, these films fabulate new forms of radical coexistence among humans, nonhumans, spirits, natural elements, and other agencies, which present new forms of re-enchanting the world (Simas and Rufino, 2020). Indeed, following Simas and Rufino, I argue that these narratives of re-enchantment are acts of resistance and anticolonial fabulation. Finally, I examine the formal elements of these films as ethnofictions, whereby storytelling constitutes a process of ethnographic co-creation, ritualisation, and preservation of ancestrality.


Mariana Cunha is a Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Westminster. She has a PhD with a focus on Brazilian Cinema and a MA in Cultural and Critical Studies from Birkbeck, University of London. She held two postdoctoral fellowships in Brazil before joining the University of Westminster. Her recent research addresses the relationship between cinematic affect, spatial practices, and ecological visualities, particularly the role of nature and the nonhuman in contemporary global cinema and screen arts, thereby addressing the growing awareness of the impacts of the global environmental crisis and how these come to bear on artistic and filmmaking practices from Latin America. She co-edited the books Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Human Rights, Social Movements and Activism in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Mariana also contributes to film festivals and screenings as a film programmer in Brazil and in the UK. She is currently curating an exhibition on eco-aesthetics and ecological practices in contemporary Latin American visual arts, which will take place in Spring 2023.


All the best,

Sarah Bartley and Tonia Kazakopoulou

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