“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” -Toni Morrison

Our lives are very often centered around our own ability to move freely within the world we inhabit. Whether that means upward mobility, the freedom to remove ourselves from a bad situation, or myriad other forms of personal movement, it is difficult to deny that a life without that essential liberty is stifled and incomplete. For too many this basic right is denied – people become mired in a life they neither built nor control, forced to toil just to stay afloat, without the ability to spread their wings. Movement is a gift that is not granted to all – it is a tool to keep some oppressed while others climb the highest peaks.

Phil Smith is a performance-maker, writer and academic researcher based in Plymouth, England. For the last 20 years or more, he has been centered on making site specific performance – artworks that are built around the practice of walking as a conscious action. Smith studied drama at the University of Bristol and, upon graduation, set up a small theater company with a fellow student. After less than a year it folded. Three years later, his co-founder called to invite him to help with the first production of a new company called TNT Theatre. In the span of a decade, the theatre grew from a U.K. specific company to an international touring company and only grew from there. The title of his new book is TNT: the New Theatre and it tells the story of this company that began as an experiment. To hear more about the theater and its history as well as a discussion about Phil Smith’s walking pieces, listen to the complete interview.

Katarina Radovic lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia. She spoke to us from lock down as the pandemic entered a second wave in Serbia. During this time she has been focusing on her own work, including previous work that she had stepped away from when life got in the way. One quarantine project involved wrapping her camera in plastic, essentially putting it in quarantine. The project itself is called Diary of a Camera in Quarantine and allowed her to record that period as it shifted from day to day. Radovic allowed the images to develop in their own way – some coming out a bit blurred, a representation of the suffocation of not only being locked down but of the effects of COVID19 on the lungs. When she looked at the photos after the project was complete, Radovic found she could not look for very long without a feeling of suffocation. For more about this project as well as discussion of another project centered around her difficult and at times traumatizing relationship with her grandmother, listen to the complete interview.