The ‘Creating Joy: Art, Refusal and the Worlding of Black Lives’ project is a collaboration between Lisa Palmer from The Stephen Lawrence Research at De Montfort University, Agostinho Pinnock a third-year Geography and Art History, PhD researcher at Loughborough University, and the Philadelphia-based filmmaker Chris Ivey. This work is supported by a ‘Right to the Discipline grant from the Antipode Foundation’.

The project will equip artists, community workers, activists, and scholars with additional tools and skills to reflect on and undo some of the built-up, negative effects of Black visual abjection in circulation. The project arises in part from the global ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020 and anti-Black policing in places like Nigeria.

At its core, ‘Creating Joy: Art, Refusal and the Worlding of Black Lives’ is interested in how Black diasporic artists and communities centre Black livingness through joy. We aim to show how, despite ongoing cycles of mediated and real violence, Black communities survive and find beauty amongst and for themselves. Our goal is to disrupt and unsettle the visual circulation of images of Black trauma through and across news and social media.

This work is supported by a ‘Right to the Discipline grant from the Antipode Foundation’