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Ama Josephine Budge - Writer / Artist / Curator
Ama Josephine Budge is a Speculative Writer, Artist, Curator and Pleasure Activist whose praxis navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism, working to activate movements that catalyse human rights, environmental evolutions and troublesomely queered identities...
Usually based in London, Ama can also be found loitering around the fried egg stalls of Accra, or gallery bookshops in New York City.
For speaking invitations: assistant@amajosephine.me
For projects proposals:
ama@amajosephine.me
Insta @amajosephine
Twitter @pleasureproff
Exhibiting Artworks
Putting the Cooker on Low
May 14th 2022 - ongoing
Putting the Cooker on Low explores the daily rituals that allow Black women, femmes and non-binary folk to keep creating in the midst of spiritual, emotional, familial, societal and ecological crises. Putting the Cooker on Low intimates that which happens in the simmer and bubble, on the back burner and the top oven, in the side eye and the hot pot. Thinking with an ancestry of Black feminist petitions for self-preservation, this visual essay works to make visible and then unsettle the ways in which Black
womxn artists internalize value-(as)-labour-(as)-capital. The cracks, crevasses and slippages these anti-erotic modes ofsurvival engender – as felt by both human and non-human ecologies – remain forced from view until they become black holes, into which we are swallowed and disappear. Often without a trace. It is with the cooker on low, that resistance might reduce into potency. It is with the cooker on low that we never run out of gas.
Recent/Upcoming Events
Mystic Ecologies: Online Panel Discussion
New Contemporaries, the South London Gallery and MA Art & Ecology at Goldsmiths University
Online Panel Discussion with curator Sophie J Williamson, writer and artist Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone, professor of philosophy Michael Marder and artist Suzanne Treister.
This discussion is part of #Mystic Ecologies, a #symposium investigating creative, #fantastical and non-human positions on the #environment and ecology. Across two days, we reflect on the environmental crisis and explore what we can learn from different perspectives.
2nd March 2023
Queer Futures / Future Queers
Queer Youth Art Collective (QYAC)
This open-to-all writing workshop is a shared space to dream the future worlds, loves, chosen families, and interspecies kin that could shape our queer futures. We will have fun with absurd microfictions, collectively build future queer characters and worlds for them to thrive in, and begin a short story of your very own.
26th February 2023
Strike Fundraiser
UCU SOAS
A night of readings and dancing in support of striking workers demands over pay, conditions & pensions in HE, organised by Ama and Abeera in support of the Abeera & I to fundraise for the @ucusoas Strike Harship Fund !
24 February 2023
Writing From and Of Our Bodies
Barbican
Using Schneemann’s work as a starting point, this event brings together contemporary writers Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone, Lauren Elkin and Juliet Jacques to explore the various ways in which they relate to bodily experience in their writing.
5th January 2023
Speculative Fiction and Fantasy: the environment, feminism, and futurity
University of Roehampton and Royal Holloway, University of London
Sini Silveri and Ama Josephine Budge come together to read fantasy and speculative fiction that grapples with futurity, the environment, and the possibilities of queer feminisms.
9th December 2023
Conference: African Queer And Trans Displacements
African Centre for Migration and Society (University of the Witwatersrand) and the Centre of African Studies (University of Edinburgh)
Sini Silveri and Ama Josephine Budge come together to read fantasy and speculative fiction that grapples with futurity, the environment, and the possibilities of queer feminisms.
1–2 December 2022
Theatre & Social Change Open Talks
Rose Bruford
An evening of conversation to consider the many ways change might be enacted in our communities as part of a series of talks for students at Rose Bruford College and wider public.
20th October 2022
Tendrils
QUEERCIRCLE
An exhibition of over 50 young LGBTQIA artists from across the UK, produced and curated by the participating QYAC members, incl. Ama, and will include a wide spectrum of mediums including textile, photography, painting, film, sculpture, drawing, and installations
5th September –2nd October 2022
PILOT III - Rights, Care and Future
Autograph
PILOT is an online course for artists and creative people to pursue arts and learning differently, through issues of rights, care and future. Now in its third year, PILOT is an intergenerational learning space for collective exchange and individual mentoring, bringing together practitioners from different places and walks of life.
5 October - 14 December 2022
 School of Commons, Footnotes is a workshop, conference and role-playing game for researchers, art professionals, students and curious people organised by School of Commons [1]. It will take place from 29 August to 1 September 2022 2045, on the campus of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). 29th August - 1st September 2022 |  Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity Led by Heather Davis with guest faculty Ama Josephine B. Johnstone and Tejal Shah, Ecologies of Precarious Abundance invites us to look again at our toxic worlds, asking what affordances or possibilities may be found. Intended for visual artists who work at the intersection of queer life and ecology, the residency will provide a lens to re-think how we might wish to understand relations with each other and with the other-than-human world. 2 August - 2 Septemb |  Tate Liverpool Joining the panel Ecopoetics and Environmental Justice responding to Bones Tan Jones artwork ‘Dream After Screen’ as part of two-day Symposium and workshop organised by Tate Liverpool and the Paul Mellon Centre. 8 July 2022 |
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 The Nest Collective The world premiere of the Feminine and the Foreign with a Q&A with the film co-directors Mars Masaai and Dr. Njoki Ngumi, two members of the Nest Collective, and also feature insights from documentary protagonists Ama Josephine Budge and Indie Max. Followed by Thames-side garden party hosted in collaboration with Brixton club night LOCAL. 2 July 2022 |  Black Cultural Archives We Should All Be Dreaming invites people to spend time listening and dreaming together in an attempt to collectively imagine new futures. Situating itself somewhere between a collective think tank, a choreographed gathering and a performance – the project invites participants to radically dream of new utopian futures together. 23 – 24 June 2022 |
Recent Publications
A City Wages Love
Architectural Review, Where do We go from here?
November 2021
Pleasurable Ecologies - Formations of Care: The Impossibilities of Invitation
Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 3, September 2021
“Pollination as Praxis: The Queer Temporalities of Intimate Ecologies
Conversation Across Place, July 2021
Ama Josephine Budge's A Shoal of Lovers Leads me Home is a " heady, hopeful sensorium"
- Michael Matheson, Anathema: Spec from the Margins
Leap
Platform London, January 2021
No Home Left Behind
Architectural Review, October 2020
“Ama is exactly the kind of young writer we need, innovative, daring, fantastical and delicious, the UK’s N.K Jemisin meets Tomi Adeyemi.”
- Tosin Coker, The Mouth of Babes
Illustrated by Fernanda Peralta
Speculative Fabulations: Beneath Yaba's Garden
Feminist Review: Archives, July 2020
Ama Josephine Budge in conversation with Angela Chan (in) Science Fiction
Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press:
Documents of Contemporary Art, 2020
Fragments Of Exercises For Learning
How To Remember/ To Member
The Harems That Haunt, Delicately
How Flexible Can We Make The Mouth - Alberta Whittle, 2019
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