Reading Cities, Seminar at Staffordshire Street, Peckham (2026)

“Reading Cities” was the second session in our series on the “Poetics of Infrastructure” hosted at Staffordshire St. In this session we explored the book “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino whose fragmented prose frames 55 fictitious cities as discussed by Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. We positioned this alongside works from Ukrainian artist Pavlo Makov’s Abracadabra series. His works are inspired by “Invisible Cities”, with Abracadabra acting as a diary, botanical codex and the notebook of a traveller moving through an uncanny landscape.

Through readings, discussion and an experimental writing exercise inspired by the Oulipo literary movement, we explored impossible and imagined cities, examining how their interpretations shift across different languages.

Reading Maps, Seminar at the Feminist Library, Peckham (2026)

“Reading Maps” was the first session in our series on the “Poetics of Infrastructure” hosted by the Feminist Library.  The session gathered around texts that treat cartography as a speculative reimagining of worlds instead of fixing territories. We read excerpts from “The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin”, published by the Architectural Association. The text brings Le Guin’s maps together with a collection of perspectives to rethink representations of real and imagined worlds. We placed this alongside Madeleine de Scudéry’s “Carte de tendre” from her novel Clélie (1654-61), one of the earliest available examples of sentimental cartography.

Across invented geographies, these works approach mapping as something porous and collaborative; a practice shaped by story and feeling toward edges of emotion. Together we discussed Maps as invitations for us to wander, misread and redraw. Through readings, discussion and a final emotional map drawing exercise, we considered how worlds are mapped into being, and how cartography might be reimagined to trace spaces of relation, care, and collective imagination.

Tender Threads Deptford X, Goldsmiths CCA (2025)

Threadbare Collective brought together “Tender Threads”, a curated performance night with a line-up of poets, movement performers and sound installation, where the works were paced to engage a sequence of difference senses. The evening explored soft spaces, tactics of care, fantasy and otherworldliness, inviting audiences to inhabit the post-industrial Oak Gallery lying down, stretching out, eyes open or closed. The event extended Threadbare’s 2025 residency research, foregrounding imaginative, gentle worlds and collaborative reflection through layered performances, sound and embodied attention.

Nadia Lesniarek: The CripPlayground Goldsmiths CCA (2025)

Artist Nadia Lesniarek led “The Crip Playground”, a talk, discussion and workshop exploring disability, play and architectural space. Beginning with an artist talk on disability theory and the history of playgrounds, the session examined how play intersects with morality, trust, risk, and the regulation of bodies from childhood. Participants engaged in collective model-making and memory writing, drawing on their own sensory experiences, archives and case studies to speculate on the radical potential of a Crip Playground, one that enables rest, nonlinear movement, trust and disabled ways of inhabiting space.

Leah Clements: Reweirding Goldsmiths CCA (2025)

Threadbare invited artist Leah Clements to lead a “Reweirding” workshop exploring audio description as a creative and critical practice. Through exercises of assigning, removing and reworking meaning, participants experimented with spoken description as a tool for disability access, perception and estrangement. Developed from Clements’s exhibition “INSOMNIA” (2022–23), “Reweirding”  invited artists and non-artists to engage audio description beyond utility, as a method for drawing out the uncanny by uncovering the strangeness in the process of understanding through description, muddling and repetition.

Katrine Skovsgaard: Embroidering the Headache Chronicles Goldsmiths CCA (2025)

“The Headache Chronicles” was led by artist and PhD researcher Katrine Skovsgaard, and formed a collective embroidery workshop responding to experiences of chronic headache pain. Through meditative stitching, shared discussion and a listening session of choir compositions from Skovsgaard’s ongoing research, participants explored migraine auras and sensory disturbance as visual and tactile forms.The workshop centred embodied knowledge, mutual care and slowness, using communal making to translate invisible pain into material expression.

Charlie Hawskfield: Folly Building Workshop Goldsmiths CCA (2025)

Artist Charlie Hawksfield led “The Folly Building Workshop” encouraging participants to view buildings as non-functional expressions of ideas. Beginning with a reading from Shirley Ardener’s “The Partition of Space”, the session examined how structures shape social meaning and perception. Participants then focused on the gatehouse as a folly, designing speculative model structures that responded to themes of territory, symbolism and control. Through collective making and discussion, participants had the opportunity to reflect on what these structures mean to them and how these forms can be expanded.

Every Mouth Needs Filling: Making Room, Reimagining the Queer Domestic Goldsmiths CCA (2025)

“Making Room: Reimagining the Queer Domestic” was a collaborative drawing workshop with Every Mouth Needs Filling. The session drew on the feminist architectural practice of Phyllis Birkby to collectively explore and reimagine queer domestic space. Through shared readings, a grounding exercise, and an open-ended drawing session, participants reflected on personal experiences of home and mapped alternative possibilities for queer architecture. Inviting speculation, care and collectivity, the workshop created space to think, draw and dream together about the political and emotional potentials of the queer home.

Rowena Harris: ‘A Crip Body of Water’ screening and conversation Goldsmiths CCA (2025)

“A Crip Body of Water” brought together a film screening, Q&A and participatory workshop with artist Rowena Harris and Threadbare Collective. Harris’s film, developed during a residency with Elan Links and Midlands Arts Centre, engages the Elan Valley’s water infrastructure through experiences of life-altering fatigue, pacing and horizontality. A post-screening Q&A was followed by a gentle workshop reimagining transport systems from the perspective of the horizontal body, foregrounding rest, access and crip ways of inhabiting infrastructure, space and time.