DARCH is the collaborative practise of Aisha Ajnabi (Umulkhayr Mohamed) and Radha Patel formed in March 2023, and a culmination of 6 years of work individually. As artists of colour, we wanted to take this as an opportunity to self-direct our creative practice and develop work we know is important, such as to support people to work through ancestral grief related to colonialism, displacement, capitalism / being poor, familial trauma, the environment. DARCH is grounded in finding creative ways to articulate care centered practices for people of colour, with a politic grounded in solidarity and liberation. DARCH overlaps shared elements of our practices namely rituals, shrine building, animism and ancestral honoring and relationships to land through sound work, conversations and storytelling.
Our residency at Arcade Campfa researches different cultural rituals that create containers of processing and validating colonial/ancestral grief and liberatory rage. Grief and rage, despite being characterized as unruly/undesirable emotions, are in fact indicators of health within a global structure of racial capitalism & cisheteronormative patriarchy, which shame us into disconnecting from our bodies in moments of intense feeling, as a way to position our bodies' intense capacity to feel, and are inherently unsafe and unproductive.
Through exploratory conversations and archival research, we'll create our own grief/rage ritual that explores the relationship between grief and rage, using vocal e
mbodiment and sound as a healing entity. The ritual will center the experiences of both queer people of colour and the more than human, creating a container that holds a process of releasing misplaced shame that is connected to grief and rage and exploring how giving ourselves the space to feel grief and rage may bring about renewed connection to our liberation.
︎ ahklmruuy
︎ a_nice_island
See our final film work and research below
