(UK)

Leeds based artist Samra Mayanja is primarily concerned with script writing. How images and multiple histories unfold and can be imagined from scripts, that are found or created with others in collective learning spaces (like a workshop or reflective space). She reproduces fragments of thought that are muted by systemic violence. Her scripts experiment with the monologue form and use a multiplicity of perspectives or internal voices melded together as a wayward narrator.

During her residency at Blast Theory Samra will be developing a new chapter of her ongoing project entitled scripted for a wayward narrator. In this iteration she’ll be attempting to make bark cloth and a script that holds the relationship between bark cloth, cotton and Lancashire cotton mills. She will embark on various ‘expeditions’ around the UK in order to find, process and present the cloth.

Bark cloth was historically a burial material for the Baganda people (of Uganda), after Uganda became a British protectorate the fig tree, from which bark cloth is made, were replaced by cotton farms that would feed the cotton mills in Lancashire.