Riana Head-Toussaint
Riana Head-Toussaint is an interdisciplinary disabled/crip artist of Afro-Caribbean heritage. Her work often crosses traditional artform boundaries, and exists in online and offline spaces. She frequently straddles multiple roles across her projects; employing choreography, performance, film, sound design, immersive installation and audience activation to create works that interrogate entrenched systems, structures and ways of thinking; and advocate for social change. Her work embraces play and danger, risk and rest, lo-fi, DIY aesthetics and unconventional processes. It rejects convention, traditionalism and arbitrary formal notions of what art can be.
Her practice is deeply informed by her movement language and embodied-experience as a wheelchair-user, her self-taught artistic background, and her training as a legal practitioner.
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Riana Head-Toussaint, Animate Loading: 1, 2022
15 minutes 53 seconds, single-channel video, sound.
For Conductive Site.
Access Statement
In this film, the material is repeated twice. The audio-descriptive track that accompanies the second viewing facilitates another form of witnessing the movement, derived from disability culture – an alternate use of language that distills the previously unseen into the seen and heard. The audio-description has been written from multiple points of view, to reflect the changes in camera point of view. The audio-described material begins at timecode 7 minutes 44 seconds.
Concept, direction and choreography: Riana Head-Toussaint
Performer/collaborators: Leo Tsao, Tom Kentta, Natalie Tso, Bedelia Lowrenčev, Jeremy Lowrenčev, Savannah Stimson, Cynthia Florek
Outside Eye: Imogen Yang
Technical Support: Stephen Dobson
Cinematography: Feras Shaheen, Kalanjay Dhir and Riana Head-Toussaint
Editing and Sound Design: Riana Head-Toussaint
Audio Description: Imogen Yang and Riana Head-Toussaint.
This work was originally developed and presented as part of Concrete, Pari, curated by Rebecca Gallo and Kalanjay Dhir. Endless thanks to Bec and Kal for believing in this work, and the whole Pari team for the support along the way.
about the artwork
Animate Loading is a site-responsive, iterative choreographic work, which first took place on a rooftop carpark. It is a disability-led project with access-centred principles at its core; designed to enable the collaborating artists to create as freely and fully as possible. A dynamic group of performers draw on their diverse movement languages and embodied experiences. Informed by the architectural and social context, the performers activate the space; reconfiguring our interactions with place, architecture and each other. The work is an embodied call to action: to disrupt, resist and change our relationships within and around so-called public space.
This film version – Animate Loading: 1 – exists to make the work accessible to those who could not attend the live performances. It seeks to convey the feelings, textures, tones and moods within the live work. It features a number of distinct visual styles to enhance the work’s themes, and heighten the embodied experience – including first-person bodycam, drone work, and surveillance-style cinematography.
about Conductive Site
Conductive Site is an online program of artworks by six diverse, interdisciplinary artists – Hanna Cormick, Riana Head-Toussaint, Shareeka Helaluddin, Lost all Sorts Collective, Jamila Main, and Daniel Savage – curated by interdisciplinary disabled/crip artist Riana Head-Toussaint.
This collective of artists is unified by a shared interest in grappling with issues of space as it relates to agency, care, community, liberation, reclamation, perception, and disconnection – as well as our prescribed and unprescribed understanding of what it means to “access” space. Unfurling here on the Firstdraft website, Conductive Site aims to create movement, conversation and change through radical re-considerations of so-called public space.
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