Interactive website
2020-2025
Supported and exhibited by Goldsmiths Exhibition Hub, London, UK
A small plaza and establishment in New Cross, La Placita, comprises restaurants, tattoo parlours and beauty shops, managed by different groups from London’s African and Latin American diasporas; it is a site of comfort for displaced people, a collectively constructed imaginary home. In it, distinct and personalised stations are spotlighted by their national flags and offer a transnational sampling of ‘third-world’ gastronomy.
As a result of the current Covid-19 crisis and the London shutdown, many of the businesses once hosted by La Placita created their own unique and sustainable systems for operating. These may have range from home cooking to delivery services that provide the local clientele with a semblance of consistency.
La Placita: Crashing the Party, was an online PR project and interactive website aimed at pushing these services forward, to help generate additional revenue and recognition of these independent businesses.
Inside ExhibitionHub.Artwe orchestrated an interactive party; imagining La Placita’s community of Afro-diasporic groups as an audience ‘crashing’ a commonly ‘whitened’ institutional matrix.
The space functioned through four main elements:
1. Food and beauty online services featuring: El Señorio Criollo, Mitad del Mundo, and Tattoo Khalifa.
2. A Karaoke Hotspot.
3. The Palm Tree Gallery featuring works by artists Janaky Mistry, Katrina Nzegwu and Tayhe Munsamy.
4. Weekly live DJ sets.
Our work with La Placita was a continuation of event hosting already present in their daily function and periodic programming. Our mission was to compliment La Placita’s existing model of nurturing and centring its community.
Featured Artists in the Palm Tree Gallery
Janaki Mistry is a British-Asian fine artist and [MA/BA credits], whose practice is based upon the self-realisation of being naïve to living within white-dominated space. Using her body as a material that navigates these arenas, Janaki contests what it means to be British and reveals hierarchies established by imperialism. Scenes at Buckingham Palace, of her mother cooking, and Wetherspoons grant insight into how contemporary life intertwines with the journeys of prior generations who migrated to the United Kingdom.
Tayhe Munsamy was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and currently lives in London where she is in her graduating year of BA Fine Art & History of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Working with the realms of speculative thinking, fictioning, mythology and folklore, her practice weaves together her identity as a mixed-race woman with the experience of Coloured and Indian communities in South Africa. Storytelling surfaces in her work in written and visual forms, to unveil the construction, displacement, transformation and fantasy of the self.
Katrina Nzegwu is a current student of BA Fine Art & History of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, following a Foundation Diploma at Kingston University London from 2017-18. Centred on an exploration of the self via personal archives, Katrina’s practice involves literature, music, art and self-authored texts, combined into works that pay heed to the diary format. Technological experimentation is foregrounded with analogue techniques of collage and illustration, using language and cultural reference to politicise her work.
