Jasmine Johnson is an artist who works with people, recording words, objects and day-to-day activities. Their recent project what's safe, what's gross, what’s selfish and what’s stupid uses writing, performance, painting and video to explore gender-fluid reproduction: how language is invented; how roles are interpreted; and how genetic materials are amalgamated in performative rituals. They work as a lecturer at Goldsmiths and are currently undertaking a practice-led DPhil at Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.
Replicating the model of a village
Organised by Jasmine Johnson and Louise Ashcroft
Replicating the model of a village queerly brings together a group of artists and academics who are thinking and doing family differently. Forming bonds and solidarity between practitioners whose questions and positions overlap, this event is a long-overdue family get-together for researchers in this field.
Replicating the model of a village is organised by Jasmine Johnson and Louise Ashcroft. It brings together community organiser Leo Schick from Queer Platonic Coparenting, academic Professor Susan Golombok and artists Krishna Istha, Harold Offeh and Jamie Anderson, aka Poz Daddy.
The event will explore subjects including 'going child-free', co-parenting as first choice, insemination (home/private/NHS), and HIV+ donors and parents, as well as:
- The concept of Mutual Aid went mainstream in the pandemic, popularising expanded and experimental kin support structures and showing how necessary it is to reform the way we care and parent as humanity faces uncertain futures.
- At this urgent cultural moment, privatised, nuclear forms of family-making feel pressurised and unsustainable — both to those within and outside of them.
- Queer people have never been able to take family for granted because they have often been excluded, and this makes them well-placed for innovation and asking questions that nobody else dares ask.
- Necessity is the mother of invention!
Louise Ashcroft is an artist who uses comedy to ask difficult questions about power and equity in public space. Louise’s performances, videos, objects, and projects chronicle her playfully disruptive investigations into relationships between the public and the authorities (state or capitalism) in places like shopping centres, trade fairs, internet spaces, strangers’ homes, museums, and the street. Her recent project CrowdMum explores reproductive equity and mutual aid through a comedy stage show Bird Hut Sperm Bank and primary research on beyond-nuclear family-making. Louise teaches at Goldsmiths and co-founded free art school AltMFA.