Vanessa Damilola Macaulay is a British artist scholar whose research is embedded in the practical and intellectual work of Black feminism. Her research aims to show that there are specific historical, cultural, and material circumstances about Black women and their bodies that mean that they cannot simply use the same strategies (both artistic and academic) that we are familiar with to think about performance.

Macaulay has been creating solo performances since 2016, and her professional practice has allowed her to tour her work across the UK, including at Derby Theatre, The Yard Theatre, and Camden People’s Theatre. Additionally, she has been programmed in several festivals, including the Plymouth Fringe Festival, Croydonites, Glasgow Buzzcuts and Talawa Firsts. As an artist, her work is interdisciplinary as she often works with live performance, movement, video, duration and objects. Despite her interest in an autobiographical approach, her work explores the representation of Blackness more broadly with a particular emphasis on the Black British experiences.

As a Black British artist and scholar who was born and raised in South East England, I have continually returned to the incompatibility between conceptions of Blackness and Britishness. In 2023, I moved to the South Side of Chicago, and the conflict between place and blackness fundamentally shifted. I am compelled to consider the entanglement of these two “Souths”, which have profoundly shaped my understanding of identity, belonging, and the cartographic possibilities of place that returns to the South. The South East of England and the South Side of Chicago offer contrasting yet intertwined narratives of Black identity. Through this lens, the problem of place, or perhaps placelessness, land and space are examined through the histories of migration, displacement, and cultural production that converge across borders and time. Therefore, this project seeks to expand these concerns by asking: How have historical migrations, both forced and voluntary, shaped the identities of communities in the Global South, with an emphasis on Black identity? In what ways do archives reflect or obscure the experiences of marginalised communities in these narratives? How can archival fragments be reimagined in contemporary creative practices that challenge dominant historical discourses?

s. Building on the archival findings, this project will use the research to create site-specific performances in the South Side of Chicago, South London and the US South region. The artistic outputs will draw on the politics of mapping space, Black feminist methodologies, prioritising embodied knowledge, storytelling, and lived experience as central to the creative process, as evident in my previous work. I'm particularly interested in understanding the spatial relationships through colonial cartographic practices in order to re-center Black, Indigenous and marginalised knowledge systems that have been historically erased or distorted.