Aileen Lees and Zain Rishi present a mix of free-flowing narrative and poetic vignettes, intended to mimic the ritual of walking. Audiences will be taken on a journey through place and time and encouraged to pause and allow wandering thoughts, while embarking on a transformation. Reclamation, temporal layers and new narratives are explored through the interweaving of archival fragments about The Paper Factory; environmental relationships in the face of industrial and urban change; personal and collective memories; and futures for communities, nature, and the site itself.
Told with a decolonised narrative, Aileen and Zain share ancestral and Indigenous knowledges, exploring movement through an interspecies lens. The vignettes act as anchor points which ground the performance in the site and its surroundings. Their collaboration is a continuation and expansion of the ideas they have developed together over the last three months.
Aileen Lees is a multi-disciplinary creative who has experience in longform content and storytelling through various creative practices, including poetry, illustration, photography, film and sound. Zain Rishi writes about the microcosms of faith, language and sexuality in memories that are entangled with the natural and urban world.
