In March this year, just I was emerging from my medical leave after long Covid, I went on the DRIFT, a weeklong artist residency in London ran by ZU-UK’s Artistic Director Persis Jadé Maravala and her team. The day after the DRIFT, at about 8am in the morning I wrote my thoughts on the experience. I remember the time because it’s unusual for me to write that early. I wrote from the body somehow, vibrating with the effects of the week onto the page. I wrote about the DRIFT and about the piece that I developed while there, which I…

This is me, in the photo above, bungee-jumping about 11 years ago at a festival in Romania. This is also me today, live streaming my vocal practice to an unsuspecting audience on Facebook. That terror on my face… same thing.

Gosh, where did the time go? Covid seems to have deleted months off the calendar and for a while we went into a time warp. Things are speeding up slowly but I’m pretty much holding my breath for round two/three/four/twenty.
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It seemed apropriate, as I embark on this practice-based PhD, to pause and question in more detail what practice based means. I know what a big deal it was for me, while I was writing the research proposal, to realise that this is possible – academia is not just books, literature reviews and theories that function as pillars (but are really the meat and bones of all work), academia is also practice – doing things and figuring out new trajectories while doing them. In all honesty, I think the realisation was something more like: life is not just books and…

I was saying to my friend Ragnar that I feel like I’m on the dance floor on a night out but it’s too early and the music is not quite there yet and I wanna dance but my whole body is tense and weird and I am being unnecessarily aware of all of its micro robotic movements. That’s how the beginning of a PhD feels like. There’s (already) a big list of things to do, places to go, people to meet, things to read and write but something is slightly awkward. But it’s kinda ok because I know that on a night out, I eventually reach a point where everything in my body feels fluid AF and I’m moving to the rhythm like there’s no tomorrow and everything makes sense and it’s really intense and awesome.