ICA is closed from the 30 May – 3 June inclusive.
What is Black Britain?
In 2021, award-winning poet Roger Robinson and acclaimed photographer Johny Pitts rented a red Mini Cooper and decided to follow the coast clockwise in search of an answer to this question. Leaving London, they followed the River Thames east towards Tilbury, where the Empire Windrush docked in 1948.
Too often, that is where the history told about Black Britain begins and ends – but Robinson and Pitts continued out of London, following the coast clockwise through Margate to Land’s End, Bristol to Blackpool, Glasgow to John O’Groats and Scarborough to Southend on Sea. Here, the authors found not only Black British culture long overlooked in official narratives of Britain, but also the history of Empire and transatlantic slavery to which every Briton is tethered.
Home Is Not a Place is the spectacular result of the journey they documented: a free-form composition of photography, poetry and essays that offers a book-length reflection upon Black Britishness – its complexity, strength and resilience – at the start of a new decade.
The book launch will be accompanied by projected imagery from the project, as well as DJ sets from Paul Camo and Eddie Otchere.
Part of the ICA 75th Anniversary Season
Johny Pitts is a writer, photographer, and broadcaster known for his work in exploring African-European identities. He is the curator of the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) award-winning Afropean.com, and the author of Afropean: Notes from Black Europe. In recognition of his work, he has received the Jhalak Prize, the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing, the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, and the European Essay Prize. The recipient of the inaugural Ampersand / Photoworks Fellowship, his photography has been exhibited at Foam (Amsterdam), E-Werk (Freiburg), and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago).
Roger Robinson won the 2019 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry and the 2020 RSL Ondaatje prize for A Portable Paradise. Roger has received commissions from The National Trust, London Open House, BBC, The National Portrait Gallery, V&A, INIVA, MK Gallery and Theatre Royal Stratford East, where he was also an associate artist.
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no. 236848.