Ziza Presents free to roam at Gift 2026
D6 is delighted to announce that artist Ziza's new body of work, Free to Roam, will be presented at GIFT: Gateshead International Festival of Theatre this May.
When: Friday 1 May, 1.30pm - 3.30pm
Venue: Caedmon Hall, Gateshead Library, Prince Consort Road, Gateshead, NE8 4LN
Age guidance: 14+
Book free tickets here
Find out more about GIFT 2026's programme on their website.
When: Friday 1 May, 1.30pm - 3.30pm
Venue: Caedmon Hall, Gateshead Library, Prince Consort Road, Gateshead, NE8 4LN
Age guidance: 14+
Book free tickets here
Find out more about GIFT 2026's programme on their website.
Ziza is developing Free To Roam through research as part of international programme Contested Desires: Constructive Dialogues. It 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.
For GIFT, Ziza will be in conversation with Dr Mwenza Blell, academic researcher, writer, artist and community organiser.
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 Contested Desires 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.
Contested Desires: Constructive Dialogues is 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?
This event is produced in collaboration with D6: Culture in Transit and GIFT.
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.
Image: Ziza, Tracepace, Contested Desires residency performance, Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Chile, 2025. Photo: Rayen Luna Solar
For GIFT, Ziza will be in conversation with Dr Mwenza Blell, academic researcher, writer, artist and community organiser.
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 Contested Desires 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.
Contested Desires: Constructive Dialogues is 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?
This event is produced in collaboration with D6: Culture in Transit and GIFT.
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.
Image: Ziza, Tracepace, Contested Desires residency performance, Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Chile, 2025. Photo: Rayen Luna Solar
The speakers
zizaZiza 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.
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Dr Mwenza BlellDr 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.
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