Moving across collage, exhibition, and live performance, the programme explores how we might remain present with one another in all our magnitudes. Through deep listening, play, and connection to queer ancestry, Bold Mellon opens a space for encounter.
Beginning with Community
The project opened with a relaxed Valentine’s community collage workshop exploring Queer Ancestry and Personal Mythologies. Through cutting, layering, and conversation, participants reflected on the people, places, stories, and protective or imagined selves that guide them, building a shared visual archive in the process.
Community collaging has long been part of Bold Mellon’s practice, previously shaping projects such as A Collective Archive at Ugly Duck, Up To No Good at Rich Mix and IS IT OK? at Stanley Arts. Each centers collective focus, care and play as tools for connection.
The Queer Frequencies: Visual Art Exhibition (Feb 15-27) continues this thread, presenting new work by Aaran Sian, Eli Delbaere, Amy-Rose Edlyn and Venus Raven, with poetry by Àmọ̀kẹ́, alongside the community collage. The exhibition frames queer ancestry not as distant history, but as a living, evolving presence.
For visual artist Aaran Sian, that presence is both intimate and expansive:
“As a Queer South Asian person I feel like my queer ancestry is deeply important in shaping an inner sense of belonging… Although I have never known their names, I feel them living in the whispers of who I am and through my inner fire. When I create, I create for all of us.”
Through layered imagery and imagined scenes – bodies, landscapes, cosmic beings – Aaran’s work holds what they describe as an “ancestral presence”, a quiet but powerful sense of continuity. “I know that I am my queer ancestors’ wildest dreams,” they say, “and that gives me strength to continue.”
Shifting Shapes Live: A Conversation in Motion
On February 28th, Queer Frequencies culminates in Shifting Shapes Live – Bold Mellon’s first live iteration of the Shifting Shapes workshop series, previously developed as a part of their residency at Ugly Duck.
Hosted by Emilia Nurmukhamet, the evening pairs experimental musicians Dear Annie, Zygmund de Somogyi and Shakira Stellar with movement artists Billy Gigurtsis, Fi Caspia, Ghost & John, Cara Louise Horsley and Théïa Maldoom – matched at random and improvising in real time.
The structure unfolds in three rounds:
One dancer with one musician
Two dancers in dialogue with sound
A full group jam, with audience members invited to join
Performers respond to ideas emerging from the collage workshop and exhibition, foregrounding presence and collective energy. Audience members can also respond with doodles, drawings or words – blurring the boundary between performer and observer.
Deep Listening as Practice
Across the programme, “deep listening” is not just a theme but a method.
For composer Zygmund de Somogyi, listening is attunement – to body, space and others:
“It requires active participation and is the first part of any creative process… It isn’t just auditory. I respond to movement, breath, light – the ways people and bodies interact with spaces.”
Zyggy describes their relationship to queer ancestry as similarly searching. Often feeling out of place in louder queer spaces, they locate their queerness in more introverted, intimate forms — shaped by digital nightlives and quieter expressions of drag, euphoria and romance. Influenced by artists such as Katie Dey and Maya-Leigh Rosenwasser, and resonating with composer Luke Deane/Lisa’s idea of “alien art”, their work navigates dysphoria, dysmorphia and the beauty of not-yet-fitting.
For drummer and percussionist Shakira Stellar, deep listening is embodied and sensory:
“It means experiencing sound in a holistic way… engaging your senses and noticing how your body transforms in response.”
After two decades with drums and percussion, Stellar listens closely to texture, pitch and vibration – whether playing with sticks or hands. Visiting her ancestral home of Guyana, she recorded waterfalls, wildlife and city life. The echo of a woodpecker tapping through trees stayed with her: “It was as if I could see the sound bouncing above and around me.”
For dancer and choreographer Billy Gigurtsis, deep listening is relational:
“It refers to how I interact with my environment and how it interacts with me… I am constantly receiving feedback from the people around me, the architecture, and myself.”
Movement emerges through a loop of attending and responding, where nothing is predetermined. “Each decision shapes the next,” he explains. “In this way I can attempt to liberate myself through movement.”
An Invitation to Be Present
Queer Frequencies centres the present moment – how we feel now, together. Through play, we learn from one another. Through improvisation, we practise responsiveness. Through art-making, we create space for connection.
Audiences are invited not only to witness, but to participate: contribute to the evolving visual archive, draw during performances, or step into the final jam as community improvisers.
Queer Frequencies offers a vibrant, queer-centred space where sound, movement and image meet – and where ancestry is not only remembered, but embodied, improvised and made together.
Visual Art Exhibition
February 15th-27th
The Living Room, Stanley Arts
Free & open to public on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays 2pm-5pm
More Info: https://stanleyarts.org/series/queer-frequencies-visual-art-exhibition/
Shifting Shapes Live
February 28th, from 7:30pm
Society Room, Stanley Arts
Free, booking required
The project is funded by Croydon Council.
