Edinburgh Art Festival, Edinburgh, 18 August 2023
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 12 November 2023

Performance work co-commissioned for Edinburgh Art Festival 2023, and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, addressing the history and development of island prisons across the globe through the colonial project of the British Empire.

The work travels from Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, to outposts of ‘empyre’ such as Spike Island, Ireland, and to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. The performance will takes the form of sonically expansive, trans-historical poem-letters addressed to ancestors incarcerated for anti-colonial revolt. Rooted in reading against the grain of archives, Raha considers what the rise and fall of these carceral islands can teach us about contemporary abolitionist struggles, addressing international connections and strategies in anti-colonial revolt from a transfeminist perspective.

EAF performance included an in-conversation with Lola Olufemi, and contributions from Glasgow Prisoner Solidarity.