SCAN Decades: Amahra Spence and Myriam Mouflih, Tuesday 25 April

Tuesday 25th April, 7.00pm
The Deep End, 21 Nithsdale Street, Glasgow
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Myriam Mouflih invites founder of MAIA Group Amahra Spence to Glasgow for a conversation about orienting ourselves towards hope. Using the various strands of MAIA’s work as inspiration for our conversation, they will discuss how abolitionist thinking shapes their approach to creative practice, and how they embed this in the work that they each do, discussing learning from the first of their Radical Imagination Labs “Life Affirming Infrastructures”.

In a landscape of ever increasing precarity and decreasing public funds, where people are asked to do more with less, Mouflih and Spence will discuss how this work is made possible and together will think through how we might orient ourselves towards a “life affirming cultural sector” in Scotland. They will also discuss the practical implications that MAIA considered when embedding this approach at the centre of their work.

Contributors

Amahra Spence is an artist, cultural worker and spatial practitioner exploring transformation in the context of liberation. Guided by lineages of Black imagination, spatial justice and more-than-human accountabilities, Amahra is particularly interested in how transformation is practiced through design, space, systems, strategy and governance.

In 2013, Amahra co-founded ‘MAIA’, an organisation that works with artists to collectively worldbuild and rehearse liberation into being. In 2020, Amahra started the ‘Black Land and Spatial Justice Project’ to amplify, resource and prototype Black-led ideas growing the capaciousness for relationship with our physical and virtual environments.

Amahra is currently Visiting Lecturer at Birmingham City University exploring ‘Architectures of Abolition’ with architecture and design students.

Myriam Mouflih is a curator and sometimes writer based in Glasgow, working across film and contemporary visual art. Myriam has programmed for festivals like Africa in Motion Film Festival and Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and organisations such as South London Gallery, Pavilion (Leeds) and The Mosaic Rooms. She was Programme Co-ordinator at Scottish Contemporary Art Network from 2020-2022, where she programmed SCAN’s Member Meets.

Access

The Deep End is just 5 minutes walk from Pollockshaws West or Queen’s Park railway stations. First Bus services routes 5 and 38 also travel down nearby Pollockshaws Road from Glasgow City Centre.

Guide dogs, hearing dogs and other assistance dogs are admitted.

The space is accessible from street level by for those with mobility needs.

This event will be live captioned.