FREE(HOLD) is a devotional live artwork at the junction of dance, performance, and ritual created by n:u (melissandre varin) and commissioned by Future Ritual and Fierce Festival. Dedicated to the practice of trying again and again, n:u gathers artists Ãssia Ghendir, Kelvin Atmadibrata, Sel Kofiga and Xie Rong (aka Echo Morgan) to collectively work with tensions faced by those settling in environments steeped in colonialism.
The five artists engage with ideas of land ownership, liberation and cultural inheritance, moving intimately within these themes and encountering the ghosts of empires. FREE(HOLD) reflects on the ways, systems of dominance, sick capitalism and accumulation condition and pre-determine complex relationships to place, land, and belonging. FREE(HOLD) is at Birmingham’s Fierce Festival on 16 & 17 October: https://wearefierce.org/fierce_events/freehold/ and in London at CEREMONY – a festival of performance art on 28 November: https://futureritual.co.uk/nu
Here n:u (melissandre varin) tells us more:
What first drew you to the idea of “trying again and again” as the central practice of FREE(HOLD)?
There are two points. The first is that I’ve witnessed in my life and most specifically in my practice, a central part of it is making the failure of moments and of practice visible. At Ceremony 2025 by Future Ritual, someone came to me after my performance. They said “What I love about your practice is that you don’t hide the figuring out. You let us witness whilst you are figuring things out in real time. You’re trying things and maybe they don’t work out, you try again. Without knowing if it’s gonna work” I thought it was a really precise observation.
The second point is about my connection to this quote by James Baldwin: “Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it”. This is irreducible. And it’s true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.”. I take part in cycles of trying, which use illusions as building blocks in an attempt to create and/or destroy.
How did you approach bringing Hoodoo, Santeria and ancestral practices into the work without reducing them to spectacle?
I used to call myself an undisciplined artist. I had a very rigid rule for myself and my practice to not rely on existing practices, including spiritual practices. In 2024/2025, I started to be curious about that. About the things people have been doing for centuries and centuries. That’s when I started to do this research, where I could trace back some of the gestures, the movements, the materials that I had assembled in my work over the years, back to specific traditions, especially Afro-Indigenous traditions. Sometimes it is as banal as watching a workshop video about protective rituals for one’s home, from Santeria traditions. I was interested in displacing this praxis. To displace this practice not only for an individual home, but to have this energy lived collectively with bodies from and with different embodied knowledge.
What does the use of ropes and Victorian railroad spikes allow you to explore about land, ownership and colonialism?
Railroad nails and rail tracks reshape landscapes. Displacing and re-defining ecosystems. Where railway passes displacement has happened. What does it mean for those handmade nails to be used by queer, differently abled and bizarre beings, feeling through questions around forming alternative relationships to land and dwelling?
In regards to the rope, It’s been interesting having conversations with the artists around perceived violence linked to specific materials. For example the rope, for those of us who come from people who have been enslaved and subjugated in the harshest ways. For us using ropes in relation to our bodies can be activating, triggering, impossible.
I’m also interested in freeing materials. From human violence, and the act of naming and inflicting physical, emotional and spiritual pain. To me, there is no material that’s good or bad. The rope is a material, with a specific history linked to former colonised people and people who still live in a version of the colonial project – all of us.
How did bringing together artists with different experiences of colonial inheritance shape the work?
To work with people whose lineages were not in the UK, before we came here, is so precious to me. For many of us the colonial beasts were experienced on ancestral lands. Weaving intimacy in an intentional way where we can devise reparative gestures for ourselves and each other, is not a mere desire but a necessity. We are treading on very tense paths, exchanging energies, stories, realities we may not have had the experience of sharing within our chosen and biological families and communities. To have the artists collaborating with the nails, the ropes, the invisible, makes me shake with anticipation and fear – some of them not mine. The nails have a relationship with the land in the UK that precedes ours.
Who gets to imagine and control landscaping? Who gets to design the ever happening present? And I am talking physically, emotionally, spiritually, etc. Over the years, I have indulged in the energy of the work of the selected artists. This is another instance where invisible guidance played a major role.
You describe movement as “medicine” — what does that mean to you within the world of FREE(HOLD)?
I’m fascinated by movement prayers. I am a Pisces, and when I dream – literally sleeping, is where the work gets done.
Back in 2024, I received these prayer movements in a dream. When I woke up, I drew them. I invited those movements like they were in the dreamscape, and came to a recollection of them in the awakened state, I invited those movements into my studio.
And the movements have interesting names. There’s one that is called ‘anointment’. Another one is ‘calling in trees’. They all have a specific frequency and are attached to elements and sit outside of organised spiritual prayer movements. I’m excited to see how it’s going to land with the other artists who may have specific practices linked to praying, how are we going to embody those movements – together?
I’m extremely grateful to be trusted by such fantastic practitioners, to be in their presence, to shape, magnify, and attune to a work that was shared with me in dreams.
What do you hope audiences take away from the work’s vision of freedom, belonging and what might come next?
If I hope for something, it’s for audiences to know that they enter a space that is not for the artists to be consumed. Here, we connect and attune to one another – where there is openness – in an attempt to be, become present with one another. We are all beings, equal beings in that space. We don’t know why we’re here. Let’s find out together. If you want to come with an expectation, for example that you’re going to be set free to some extent, what can you do to contribute to this? What’s your role in making this moment contribute to what your heart is longing for? We as artists are a reflection of godly energy (in a non-religious way), as much as you are.
Next? We try again and again and again …