"A company that will be at the forefront of politically-rooted work that practices the cultivation of community we all need in order to thrive."
Izzy Rabey / Facilitator & Director
about us
Hiya, we are Jane and Néa! We work in iterations and cycles, drawing from our liberatory lens of reframing and repurposing spaces as living archives. We work in transitional spaces and non-traditional performance settings such as corridors in old buildings or hidden tree canopies. Our work is methodical and inviting, guiding participants through experiences using tools like questions, dreaming, objects and intimacy.
Jane Morris
I’m a transfeminine playwright and artist interested in text-based game design. As part of shelf/break, I write a lot of provocations, text, and scores for mapping out our experiences. I love 121 performance and sharing intimate moments of ephemeral encounters with people in clubs and house parties. My work is grounded in my socialist politics and anti-imperialist beliefs. I see art as a space to enable us to become more human.
Néa Ishana Ranganathan
I’m a genderqueer durational and live artist interested in the documentation of Tamil homeland. As part of shelf/break, I build objects, sculptures, and zines as a form of archiving our practice. I love working in and with the land as a way of building meaningful encounters through clay, body, ritual, protest, and elongating time. My work is grounded in anti-colonial politics and guerrilla resistance movements. I strive to humanise freedom fighters and curate spaces for generational healing in opposition to the eradication of our people, languages, and lands.
methodology
Our methodology emerged from our shared interest in resistance and site-responsive work. We want to find meaning in our locations, responding to the specificity of the buildings, cities, landscapes, and people who are performing the show with us. We have a cyclical approach to making which helps our sustainability. By thinking in iterations, we can take the time to create work without rushing, while providing space for other artists and participants to breathe and rest. We are interested in work which invites the audience into playful participatory dialogues around histories of radical political action, and which passes on practical knowledge and organising skills.
inspirations
Our practice is rooted in our political and artistic ancestors, and all those who have struggled for liberation from systems of oppression. Some artists who inspire us and who we have shared with our undeveloped artists include Bobby Baker, Liz Rosenfeld, Claye Bowler, Toni Lewis, Avery Alder, Ray Young, and Evelynne Axell.
We also however have particular connections with certain artists. Néa worked on the UK tour of Memory of Birds by Tania El Khoury as Lead Audience Guide at Mayfest and Norfolk and Norwich Festival. Tania’s work is deeply meaningful for both of us, especially when we consider the ways our own practice meshes audience agency with explorations of histories of resistance. We have previously interviewed Emma Frankland, who makes beautiful material-based and punky trans art, often utilising rituals and questions of imagined histories. We also deeply admire Sheila Ghelani, who was our mentor for our graduate show and informed our approach to detail and pace and our fascination with objects.
Our political inspirations come from our organising work with our anti-imperialist campaign and collective, Built On Blood. We also look to the Tamil Tigresses, PAIGC, The Black Panthers, Franz Fanon, STAR, ACT UP, Lola Olufemi, Saidiya Hartman, and Student Encampments / Demonstrations for a Free Palestine.
I am a live artist and land-based sculptor. I document language through the land, and I document people through language. I physically immerse myself in substances to understand them. I use all of these ways of engaging with historical archives in my dissertation, ‘I drink the salt water to get sick’. My dissertation, and my performance work that surrounds it, has a major impact on my thinking as part of shelf/break.
When returning to the poems of Tamil resistance fighters and academics, I have responded to them in a way based on my somatic experience growing into a queer Tamil adult. I have written poems, and I have performed with salt, ash, ink, water, and clay covering my body. These materials turned me into a walking archive of the struggle for liberation in Tamil Eelam, which is at the heart of my practice as an organisor and artist.
I am currently looking to publish my dissertation, which can be read on the archive page. Please contact me if you would be interested in discussing it further.
a note on documentation / Néa
I make work which is influenced by my passion for interactivity, immersion, and play. I embed these approaches into the work of shelf/break, which is often focussed on heightening the experience of a communal (small group) or one-to-one encounter. I have previously undertaken placements at Coney and Now Play This, two now-closed companies which created, curated, produced, and upheld the power of playful art to create connection, community and change.
When I design games, I think about the ways we can tell stories about whole communities, rather than solo heroes. I think about the radical potential of nostalgia, of being transported to worlds which might-have-been, to help us envision the worlds we want to build. I think about how fragile human life is, and how much people have to sacrifice to achieve change, and how that too can be embedded into the act of playing with another person.
a note on game design / Jane
