This two-day event foregrounds artistic practices taking place outdoors. It expands on Tate Modern’s exhibitions and displays of Ana Mendieta, Richard Long and Britto Arts Trust. Like Spores, We Spread centres situated relations with land and memory, taking into account notions of reciprocity and responsibility for what surrounds us and that we are a part of.
With invited artists and contributors, we explore how living environments become hosts for works that cannot be confined by gallery walls. Rather than approaching the outdoors as a neutral space, the event considers territory as a relational field shaped by displacement, ecological entanglements and colonial legacies.
Like Spores, We Spread invites communal pedagogical experiments of reading, walking and eating together in the spirit of an outdoor summer school. The event thinks back to 1960-70s historical precedents; practices that ventured out and are now germinating through collective forms of transmission, movement, listening and shared learning.
Organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational in partnership with Hyundai Motor; in collaboration with the Laboratoire d’art et de recherche décoloniaux (LabARD), Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), with the support of the Canada Research Chair in Decolonial Artistic Practices and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Like Spores, We Spread is supported by Samdani Art Foundation and Fluxus Art Projects.
Friday 11 September, 17.30–21.15
Tate Modern Landscape
Programme:
17.30–17.45 Introduction
17.45–18.30 Performance: Eve Tagny
Eve Tagny will share a performative reflection on questions of ownership and private property. Unearthing histories in relation to London and the areas surrounding Tate Modern, the performance highlights how private capital accumulation and colonial expansion continue to shape the movements of plants, people and the rhythm of our cities.
18.30–19.00 Break
19.00–19.45 A Walk Through Ana Mendieta's Practice
Join us for a conversation between Rahmouna Boutayeb, curator at MO.CO, Montpellier and Raquel Mendieta, the artist's niece and a filmmaker herself, focusing on Ana Mendieta's artistic practice and her engagement with the natural world.
19.45–20.45 Performance: Harun Morrison - After Nostalgia
After Nostalgia is a participatory score for a windy setting. It draws on a scene from the 1983 film Nostalgia by Andrei Tarkovsky, in which one of its characters attempts to cross a thermal pool while carrying a lit candle. This version invites attendees to collectively perform this action on the south landscape of Tate Modern.
21.00–21.15 Ana Mendieta - Alma, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece)
Witness a restaging of Ana Mendieta’s 1976 firework Silueta and experience this artwork in the darkness of a late summer evening.
Saturday 12 September, 12.30–16.30
Tate Modern Landscape
Programme:
12.30–15.00 Shared Meal: Let’s Eat with Britto Arts Trust’s Pakghor
Let’s Eat is a LabARD series in which one person cooks for the group and reflects on the histories, memories and relationships carried by the dish. For this edition, Let’s Eat comes together with Pakghor, Britto Arts Trust’s social kitchen, around a meal prepared by Britto and shaped by relationships to land, displacement and resistance. We invite you to reflect together on the everyday experience of eating as a counter-colonial living practice of reciprocity, memory and connection.
15.00–16.30 Confluences, A Reading-Walk with LabARD
Join us for a collective walk, reading and conversation around excerpts from A terra dá, a terra quer [The Earth Gives, The Earth Wants] by Brazilian quilombola writer and community leader Antônio Bispo dos Santos (Nêgo Bispo). Drawing on quilombola knowledge, the book develops counter-colonial ways of thinking about land, relation and collective life. Around Tate Modern, participants will explore confluences between text, place and collective creation, and think-feel land as a relational, historical, diasporic and political field.
Please note, places are limited and this walk will also take place in rainy conditions.
Britto Arts Trust
Britto Arts Trust is an artist-led non-profit collective officially founded in 2002 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, with a global reach. It is based in Green Road, Dhaka, but works extensively across the country and beyond. Britto is an expansive, sustainable contemporary art environment and culture that seeds and promotes interdisciplinary practitioners, groups, and networks in Bangladesh's art scene. It provides an international and local forum for the development of professional art practitioners, a place where artists can meet, discuss, experiment, and collaborate on their own terms. Various versions of Britto’s project Rasad from ‘documenta fifteen’ are in the permanent collections of Kunsthaus Zurich; Neue Galerie, Kassel, Germany; Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands, and Tate Modern, London. Rasad is currently on display at Tate Modern.
Rahmouna Boutayeb
Rahmouna Boutayeb is a curator at MO.CO. (Montpellier, France), and an independent curator. At MO.CO., she works on the conception and production of exhibitions, as well as the accompaniment of the artist-in-residence programme. She also coordinates and contributes through articles and interviews to exhibition catalogues. Her research fields revolve around feminism; questioning the construction of historical narratives; archaeology, memories and legacies and their narration, real or fictional; and ancestral know-how and practices, re-examined or assimilated by artists. In 2023, alongside Vincent Honoré, she curated Ana Mendieta. Search for Origin, which toured to MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain, and Musée des beaux-arts La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.
Raquel Cecilia Mendieta
Raquel Cecilia Mendieta is a filmmaker and writer best known for her recent films about her aunt, the artist Ana Mendieta. Her work has screened at film festivals and art museums worldwide. Raquel Cecilia also serves as administrator of the Estate of Ana Mendieta, where she has overseen the digital restoration of the artist's filmworks since 2003.
Harun Morrison
Harun Morrison is an artist and writer based in London and a Somerset House Studio Resident. He is a former associate artist with Greenpeace UK. His forthcoming novel, The Escape Artist, will be published by Book Works. Since 2006, Harun has collaborated with Helen Walker as part of the collective practice They Are Here. He is a former trustee of the Black Cultural Archive (est. 1981).
Eve Tagny
Eve Tagny is a Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based artist. Weaving lens-based media, performance and text into site-specific installation, her practice adopts a poetic approach to consider landscapes and gardens as sites shaped by cycles of rejuvenation tangled with the legacies of colonial expansion, capital accumulation, private ownership and human activity.
Tagny has a BFA in Film Production from Concordia University and a Certificate in Journalism from University of Montreal. Recent exhibitions include WKV and Biennale for Freiburg, Germany; Somerset House, London; Henry Art, Seattle; MNBAQ, MAJ, Momenta Biennale and MAC, Quebec. Performances include Swiss Institute, NYC; Nuit Blanche, Toronto.
LabARD
The Laboratoire d’art et de recherche décoloniaux (LabARD) is a research-creation laboratory based at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Founded in 2021, LabARD brings together artists, researchers, students and cultural workers engaged with decolonial approaches in art, research-creation and pedagogy. Its work focuses on collective methodologies, diasporic memories, situated knowledge, transmission and co-creation. The LabARD team joining the event in London includes Aziz Boughedir, Eluza Maria Gomes and Gina Thésée.
As part of its contribution to Like Spores, We Spread, LabARD is organising Thinking-Feeling the Land as Diasporic Territory, an École buissonnière taking place in Montreal on 7 and 11–13 August 2026.
All Tate Modern entrances are step-free. You can enter via the Turbine Hall and into the Natalie Bell Building on Holland Street, or into the Blavatnik Building on Sumner street. There are lifts to every floor of the Blavatnik and Natalie Bell buildings. Alternatively you can take the stairs.
- Fully accessible toilets are located on every floor on the concourses
- A quiet room is available to use in the Natalie Bell Building on Level 4
- Ear defenders can be borrowed from the Ticket desks
To help plan your visit to Tate Modern, have a look at our visual story. It includes photographs and information about what you can expect from a visit to the gallery.
For more information before your visit:
- Email hello@tate.org.uk
- Call +44 (0)20 7887 8888 (daily 10.00–17.00)
