In the final episode of Season Two of Living Archives, Rebecca Bellantoni and Gail Lewis exchange ideas on home and belonging, the legacy of black cultural and social movements in pre-2000s Britain, and the ways everyday life shapes their work.

Conversation transcript available here.

Co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and International Curators Forum, Living Archives is a podcast foregrounding intimate, intergenerational conversations between UK-based diasporic artists.

The pairings in each episode begin with an invitation from one artist to another. Together, they exchange insights into art-making, memory and the ideas and influences shaping their practices. Rooted in Stuart Hall’s vision of a ‘living archive’, the series is a record of creative dialogues that explore how histories, identities and artistic practice are considered in the present.

Hosted by Yewande YoYo Odunubi

Edited by Chris Browne

Original designs by Yolande Mutale

Season Two designs by Joanna Risvik

Music by LOX  

To Whom It May Concern.

I was a London child.

Making alters to concrete long before the green.

Tethered.

To foundations laid long before.

Do you see?

My alters glow, depth dark.

Looking forward,

Rebecca Bellantoni

Bellantoni’s recent projects/performances/exhibitions include her solo show Day and heavy, Judah leaves at De La Warr pavilion (2024), Condition the roses, accept the vision. C.R.Y), Tate Britain, London (2023); La Position de l’Amour, CNAC Magasin, Grenoble (2023); In the house of my love, Brent Biennial, London (2022); Frieze Live London (2021). She has been a recipient of bursaries and awards from Fluxus Art Projects, Womxn of Colour Art Award (2022), and Jerwood Arts (2020). She was shortlisted for the 9th Max Mara Art Prize for Women(2023). In 2025, she will launch The Institute of C.R.Y

Gail Lewis is Visiting Professor at Yale University and Reader Emerita in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College. She is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist having trained at the Tavistock Clinic. Her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of black feminist and anti-racist struggle and through a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. She was a member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group and one of the founder members of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, Britain’s first national organisation for black and other women of colour. She organises her thinking through the category ‘experience’ which she conceives as a vector of both the felt senses and an analytic in the production of meaning and knowing otherwise. She is currently writing a book on Black feminism in Britain and has written on feminism, intersectionality, the welfare state and citizenship, psychoanalysis and Black feminism, and the psychosocial dynamics of racialised-gendered experience.

Her publications include ‘Black Arsenal: Potentiality of being and becoming’ (2024) in Black Arsenal, eds. Clive Nwonka and Mathew Harle; ‘Whose Movement Is It Anyway?: Intergenerationality and the Problem of Political Alliance’, Radical Philosophy, 2-14, Spring; ‘Race, Gender and Social Welfare: encounters in a postcolonial society’ (2000), Polity Press; ‘Citizenship: personal lives and social policy’ (2004), ed. Polity Press; ‘Birthing Racial Difference: conversations with my mother and others’ (2009) Studies in the Maternal;, vol.1 ‘Where Might I Find You’: Popular Music and the Internal Space of the Father’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society (2012); ‘In the Absence of Truth, At Least Not the Lie: travels towards self, other, relatedness’, BPS, Psychology of Women Section Review (Spring, 2012); ‘Questions of Presence’, (2017) Feminist Review, Issue 117; ‘Black Feminism and the Challenge of Object Use’ (2020) Feminist Review 126 (1). ‘Unsafe Travel: experiencing intersectionality and feminist displacements’ (2013) Signs: journal of women in culture and society.

She works alongside artists and other creative practitioners to explore, disrupt and offer alternatives to the violent and violating representations of black and queer lives. She, along with Barby Asante, Foluke Taylor and others, recorded a reading of M. NourbeSe Philip’s essay ‘Caribana: African Roots and Continuities’ for the podcast Dipsaus (first available to coincide with the on-line version of London’s annual Nottinghill Carnival in 2020). She also participated in NourbeSe Philips Zong! Global 2020. She believes that intergenerational conversations, as part of process of ancestral connection and guidance, are among the most urgent in these times. She is a season ticket holder for Arsenal soccer club.

Co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and International Curators Forum, supported by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the Power of Pop Fund and Arts Council England.

Writer, researcher, member of the Stuart Hall Foundation Peer Network and a speaker in this year’s In Search of Common Ground programme, Dr. Lola Olufemi shares insights and reflections on her experience participating in the Reading the Crisis conversation series.

I found the format of the Reading the Crisis series particularly generative – thinking about the present conjuncture through the threads left by an intellectual exchange between CLR James and Stuart Hall emphasised the importance of public dialogue as a means of combatting the anti-intellectualism of our increasingly fascist present. We must emphasise the connectivity of radical thinking across forms and arenas in order to reinvigorate the process of interpretative struggle that creates a culture. The dialogue allowed me to consider the creation of new strategies for attending to the present – particularly Houria’s insistence that notion of Gramsci’s notion of the ‘Integral State’, the relationship between the state and civil society as it operates in Europe is racialised and that this integral racial state “however tentacular, does not exhaust either the human being or their capacity to break the chains and enjoy their freedom.” Our conversation illuminated the responsibility of cultural workers, public intellectuals and academics to address the persistence of race as an ordering principle, a “floating signifier”, and the beating heart of the fascist project which is expressed through “common sense” objections to forms of migration in the United Kingdom. It also highlighted the affective dimensions of political education – if we can move people towards political consciousness, actions, affiliations and relationships which reject the myopic and alienated existence we have inherited from the neoliberal project of the last two decades through cultural interventions like this, we should not hesitate to do so. This is one part of a multi-pronged strategy.

I am always thinking about how we gain deeper understanding of the political legacies to which they belong and work in service to extend them in new ways. The necessity of making connections across time cannot be understated. My conversation with Houria made me realise that the exchange between CLR James and Stuart was not an archival relic, locked into the domain of the past; the insights they shared were pertinent to the present moment and were rearticulated in our conversation through a feminist lens. It reminded me of what I already know: we may live under different conditions but the political project remains the same.

– Lola Olufemi, September 2025

The Stuart Hall Foundation welcomed cultural theorist, poet and teacher of performance studies, Fred Moten, as keynote speaker for the 9th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation. The event took place on Saturday 23rd May at Conway Hall in London and online via livestream broadcast as the first 2026 event in our In Search of Common Ground programme.

Moten’s keynote, drafted under the title ‘The Physics of Political Economy’ and delivered as ‘(Notes on Genocide:) Violence and the Physics of Political Economy’, used Stuart Hall’s critical engagement with Karl Marx as a point of departure to speak to the realities of practising the rejection of individuation.

The keynote was preceded by an address by Catherine Hall on the achievements of the Stuart Hall Essay Prize, and followed by a discussion between Moten and Angela McRobbie and an audience Q&A.

Following the event, attendees were invited to congregate in the hall for an informal reception with food catered by Goodness Gracious Feast and a DJ set from Anu Ambasna.

Skin Deep’s pop-up library of liberatory texts was set up in the hall throughout the day, offering attendees the opportunity to relax and flip through their back prints, works from collaborators and inspirations for their latest editions. Newham Bookshop hosted a stall with titles related to the programme available on sale throughout the event.

Supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Power of Pop Fund, in collaboration with Conway Hall.