Ziza Patrick and Ricardo Januário Residency Exchange 2025

Published on: Monday August 11, 2025

Ziza and Januário will embark on a two-week residency at FABRIC, Nottingham, centred on cultural exchange, collaboration, and embodied research.

This residency offers a dedicated space for both artists to engage deeply with each other’s practices, framed through the lens of their respective cultural heritages and the environments they inhabit and navigate.

The residency will serve as a platform for mutual exploration, an opportunity to examine how individual and collective memory, resilience, and identity are expressed through movement, performance, and the politics of the body. Together, they will unpack the nuances of cultural storytelling and self-representation, asking:

How do we voice our histories through the body?
How do we carry the invisible weight of legacy into our work?

While rooted in shared inquiry, the collaboration will also focus on the ongoing development of Ziza’s dance theatre work Dandyism, a project initially researched in 2017 and first publicly performed in 2018. Fully commissioned by Arts Council England in 2019, Dandyism draws inspiration from Ziza’s memories of growing up in Kigali, Rwanda, particularly the image of Congolese men dressed in vibrant, flamboyant fashion. These powerful visual memories opened a path to researching the colonial legacy embedded in style, where clothing once imposed on enslaved people was reclaimed and transformed into acts of elegance, resistance, and cultural pride.

In this context, Dandyism becomes not only an aesthetic investigation but a political and spiritual reclamation. Dandyism will serve as an anchor for our collaboration, offering a foundation while leaving space for expansion, experimentation, and mutual enrichment. Through this collaboration, Ricardo will bring in his evolving research, Desarranjo Corporal (“bodily disruption”), which explores the transversality of movement languages and the dismantling of normative physical structures. His practice interrogates how movement can exist in tension, disruption, and transformation, offering a vital lens through which to reframe narratives of power, history, and resistance.

Both artists share a commitment to creating work that foregrounds resilience, resilience born out of communities that often must rely on themselves or each other to make meaning, assert presence, and claim space.

The residency will be driven by this shared thematic core: the beauty and tension of resilience, and how it manifests in bodily histories, memory, dress, and cultural expression. Throughout the residency, Ziza and Ricardo will engage in studio-based research, critical dialogue, and collaborative experiments, working across movement, theatre, and performance. Their aim is to create space for visibility, dialogue, and connection—exploring not only what brings them together as artists, but also how their distinct lineages and inquiries can enrich each other’s practices.