Join for HOW TO PLAY LOVE, PLAY PLAY LOVE if you are fascinated by love’s underbelly. We’ll spend eight weeks with artists and filmmakers who are interested in the awkward siblings of idealised love—fetishisation, validation, approval, and other experiences that feel like love but probably are not.

What unfolds when an idealised image of love is cut by asymmetries of power expressed in race, passports, gender, sexuality, class? This programme foregrounds artists and filmmakers who unravel the romance plot in favour of juicier stories.

Derica Shields is a writer and editor from South London and based in Amsterdam/Rotterdam, working across disciplines, with a particular focus on Black aesthetics, cultures and epistemologies. Black failure and is forthcoming from Book Works.

Her oral history project A Heavy Nonpresence which gathers seven Londoners’ accounts of the British welfare state was published by Triple Canopy in 2021. She was a 2022–23 resident at Jan Van Eyck Academie where she developed 'Given to Cottons and No Silk', a two-channel video installation and, in 2023, she gave the second annual Sylvia Wynter Lecture at King’s College London. Her book Bad Practice considers the potentials of Black failure and is forthcoming from Book Works.