Content alert: This podcast includes reference to suicide

Abu Ansari is a performer and facilitator working in Chicago and London. He spent 20 years performing on Chicago stages and worked as a performance-based facilitator addressing a variety social issues. He co-founded Mango Riot Theatre in the UK, launching a program that engages youth in colonial history debates. While earning an MA in Applied Theatre, he explored loneliness and minority stress through participatory workshops for LGBTQ+ communities in London. His current project, The Other L Word, invites adults to share experiences of loneliness through performance, aiming to challenge societal structures that perpetuate isolation.

Weblink: www.mangoriot.org

Categories: Artists on the practice

Arts and Health

Send us a text

Explore more Breaks & Joins podcasts, on the repair of our stuff, ourselves and our communities. Subscribe to make sure you dont miss any!

Sofie Layton is an artist, researcher and facilitator who has worked nationally and internationally for over 30 years. Her most recent research practice explores the interface between artist, patient and clinical landscapes. Interweaving lived experience with remediated medical data, she examines how the human story is entangled with the medical. Previous commissions include installations ‘Bedside Manners’ (Evelina Children’s Hospital 2012) and ‘Making the Invisible Visible’ (Great Ormond Street Hospital 2015-2016) exhibited internationally. ‘The Heart of the Matter’ (2016-2018), a national touring exhibition funded by Wellcome and ACE, addressed the medical, experiential and poetic dimensions of the heart. In ‘Does AI Care?’ (2023), commissioned by the London Science Gallery, she worked alongside young adults in remission from cancer to probe AI’s role in contemporary medical care. Her PhD, funded by LAHP - London Arts and Humanities Partnership (AHRC), awarded in 2025, developed multiple methods of artistic remediation and translation of medical data. This was used to investigate the materialisation of pregnancy, culminating in the performative installation Loss is Mine and is Stored within this Body. She has since become a research associate on the Visual and Materials Lab which is part of the Discovery Research Platform for the Medical Humanities at Durham University (funded by the Wellcome Trust). Her current research practice extends her PhD work, further exploring the non-diagnostic use of medical data through workshops, artworks and performance.

http://www.sofielayton.co.uk

http://www.insidetheheart.org

@sofielayton

Send us a text

Explore more Breaks & Joins podcasts, on the repair of our stuff, ourselves and our communities. Subscribe to make sure you dont miss any!

James Holcombe is a filmmaker with decades of experience in photochemical film production. His practice merges a deep engagement with re-discovered historical, material and social processes of photochemical film production through single screen and expanded performance works. He is the owner of erehwon film. erehwon runs workshops and actively curates workshops, performances, screenings, residencies, and events through workshops and bespoke 1:1

https://www.erehwonfilm.uk/

Insta: erehwon_film

Italian-born Alberto Bona began his journey as a cartoonist before honing his craft as an actor in London. Fascinated by the expressive power of silent cinema, he has produced and filmed several short films and music videos using clockwork cameras. His work is distinguished by flamboyant characters inhabiting worlds that blur the line between the surreal and the oneiric.

Instagram: @arepofilms

Send us a text

Explore more Breaks & Joins podcasts, on the repair of our stuff, ourselves and our communities. Subscribe to make sure you dont miss any!