While we were excited to have actual real life residents with us in October, the tightening of restrictions both here and in Australia have forced us to cancel our residency with Bianca. But only in person. We’ll work with Bianca remotely and look at ways we can continue the exchanges made possible by our usual programme.

Bianca Willoughby is a Sydney-based interdisciplinary transfeminine indigenous artist whose practice involves collaboration with artists and practitioners from a variety of creative fields including dance, theatre, 3D and VR design, performance, costumes and textiles. Informed by a keen interest in queer/crip theory and disability advocacy, Bianca’s work makes visible the often hidden and unspoken world of the chronically ill.

The Remediation Room is an interactive, multi-activated installation that seeks to create an empathic safe space for organ transplant recipients, chronically ill patients, the disabled and the general public. Using concepts of crip theory, cross-modal aesthetics, somatic therapy, and consensual healing practices, the room will be the site of a multi-sensorial interactive VR experience based on a visually poetic provocation of the inner emotional world of chronically ill transplant patients. The voices of the Creative Hybrids Lab participants will be recorded, transcribed and played back in the installation as experimental audio soundscape and a video animated text. The recordings seek to disrupt typical notions of transplant narratives and to give voice to the complexity and vulnerability of lived experience. Artworks and texts created by the Lab will also be exhibited. The room will be multi-activated by a series of discussions, workshops, performances conducted during the course of the exhibition

You can read a little more about Bianca here on her profile page.