Welcome
to correspondences. Our aim is to create lasting people connections across cultures through the medium of art.
to correspondences. Our aim is to create lasting people connections across cultures through the medium of art.
2 March—31 May 2025
Welcome to the residency page for the three-month project Inciting Joy featuring future soul artist Tiana Khasi and visual artist, writer and researcher Cecilia Sordi Campos. Here, you can find a range of different content generated or presented in connection with Cecilia and Tiana’s residence with us. The March ‘What’s On’ outlines the project announcement, an extract of which is also appended below. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out at info@correspondences.work.
Inciting Joy / Tiana Khasi & Cecilia Sordi Campos
2 March ––31 May 2025
“I should be dancing with happiness.”
But it happened again. It happens
when we make bottomless love—
there follows a bottomless sadness
which is not despair
but its nameless opposite.
— ‘Joy’ by Lisel Mueller (1)
Inciting Joy is a collaborative residency that examines how we understand, experience and cultivate joy in our everyday lives, the way that this transforms with different stages of womanhood and experiences of ecstatic connection with the human and the more-than-human world of nature.
Alongside our examination of joy is the exploration of its intersection with pleasure. More specifically, the action of reclaiming pleasure as a way of challenging wrongful stereotypes of womanhood and creating freedom and space for joy to happen.
At the heart of the project is a proposition. Joy is a form of resistance —an action, practice or method of being cultivated in search of a greater purpose, entangled with others and the natural world, and often, but not always, brought into focus by what we have suffered.
As the poet, essayist and Professor of literature, Ross Gay writes:
My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow — which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow — might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. (2)
And yet, joy is mysterious, multiform and unpredictable. Sometimes, it comes about not in relation to suffering but in response to our ancient, ecstatic, embodied connection with the natural world and its deep, unknowable mysteries. As the naturalist Michael McCarthy writes:
There can be occasions when we suddenly and involuntarily find ourselves loving the natural world with a startling intensity, in a burst of emotion which we may not fully understand, and the only word that seems to me to be appropriate for this feeling is joy, and when I talk of the joy we can find in nature, this is what I mean. (3)
In these moments, we do not encounter the joy of discovering meaning necessarily but perhaps the joy of finding spiritual refuge from the existential obligation to make meaning — to simply 'be' in relation to the world and its phenomena.
Presented in three parts, Inciting Joy features the music, performance and community-singing practice of Samoan/Indian future soul artist Tiana Khasi and the video, poetry and mixed-media works of Brazilian visual artist, writer and researcher Cecilia Sordi Campos.
The title of our project pays homage to Ross Gay’s book of the same name, Inciting Joy, his inspired thinking and poetry about the deep matter of joy.
We also wish to acknowledge the translations of ‘Inciting Joy’ below - in Samoan, Brazillian Portuguese and Khasi. Our communications will shift between these translations/titles as the artists continue to explore them together through this project.
Faaosofia Le Olioli /Aguçando Alegria/ Ka jingpynshlur ia ka jingkmen
Alongside the exhibitions, special events and activities for audiences are planned. For further information, continue reading or head to our Ticket Tailor Event page via the button below.
The words above are those of curator Emma Thomson except where otherwise noted.
Notes—
(1) Lisel Mueller, ‘Joy’, Alive Together: New and Selected Poems, 1996, LSU Press, p. 199
(2) Ross Gay, Inciting Joy, 2022, Algonquin Books, New York, p. 9
(3) Michael McCarthy, The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, 2015 (Kindle ed), John Murray, p. 244
