About
 

​Free To Roam is a new body of work by artist Ziza, presented in conversation with Mwenza Blell. The project explores Western knowledge systems - including religion, art history and scientific inquiry - and how power is upheld across these frameworks. Drawing on oral histories, speculative world‑building and personal heritage, the work questions how everyday structures produce authority, and whose experiences are recognised, valued or erased.

Rather than following a single historical narrative, Free To Roam embraces fragmentation and partial visibility, reflecting how bias often operates within systems that present themselves as neutral or objective. The event opens by inviting audiences to ‘step into another’s shoes’ - with clean shoes provided for the collective experiment - encouraging reflection on how colonial legacies continue to shape institutions, perception and resistance in daily life.
 

Using embodied, decolonial artistic research and drawing on residencies at culturally significant sites - including the Museo Egizio in Turin and Santiago’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights - Ziza examines how power, exclusion and control are embedded within seemingly ordinary systems and practices.

Ziza’s research is part of the international programme Contested Desires: Constructive Dialogues - an ambitious conversation between contemporary artists and the museums, archives, and communities that hold and shape Europe’s colonial histories. Artists from Africa, Europe and South America respond to two central questions: What is the continuing impact of colonial heritage today, and whose stories are given space to be heard?

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Artist biographies

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Ziza is a multidisciplinary artist of Rwandan heritage, engaging with mediums of performance and installation to challenge preconceived ideologies about identity, power and blackness. They create a variety of work that explores and challenges euro-centric and Western knowledge systems. Through their unfolding embodied practice and research, they reveal the entangled legacy of colonialism in the contemporary world and the everyday things we are exposed to but rarely question.

 

Dr Mwenza Blell is an academic researcher, writer, artist and community organiser based in Newcastle upon Tyne. An anthropologist, she has worked on a range of projects in the UK, the Nordic region, Latin America, South Asia and East Africa. Her research draws from in-depth ethnography to examine intransigent and often invisible structures of injustice.

 

D6: Culture in Transit is a visual arts producer working with extraordinary artists, communities and partners across continents with a shared belief in the value of the arts in creating a more just and equal society. From their studios Newcastle they work in partnership to co-produce internationally significant and locally relevant art making connections between the North East of England and the rest of the world.​

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Supporters

 

This event is produced in collaboration with D6: Culture in Transit and GIFT.

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Contested Desires is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. In the UK, we are grateful for the support of Arts Council England, National Lottery Heritage Fund, Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Newcastle Cultural Investment Fund.