Friday, March 29, 2024

Rocca Gutteridge

Rocca Gutteridge is a cultural producer with a penchant for queerness, laughter and – both the mess and potential – of human connections. Rocca is currently a PhD candidate in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and British Council’s Head of Arts Kenya and East Africa.

Rocca’s academic research investigates entanglements of contemporary queer aesthetics and state politics in Uganda and the UK. Prior to this project, Rocca received a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Sculpture and a Masters in Contemporary Art Theory at Edinburgh College of Art (Student Awards Agency scholarship).

Within the British Council, Rocca strategies and delivers the East Africa Arts programme which connects artists and organisations across Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania and the UK.

From 2011 – 2016, Rocca co-founded and directed 32° East | Ugandan Arts Trust, a centre for contemporary visual art in Kampala, Uganda.  During this time, Rocca co-produced KLA ART 012 and was Project Director of KLA ART 014, a biennial public art festival taking place in Kampala’s city centre.

Rocca has delivered curatorial projects for Edinburgh International Art Festival, Glasgow International Festival and the Mela Festival of World Music and Dance. She has undertaken curatorial residencies at Deveron Arts (Scotland), Terre Sans Frontier (Morocco) and the Edinburgh and Scottish Sculpture Workshops.

A 2016 ISPA Global Fellow, Rocca has produced workshops for and given presentations at: Raw Material Company (Dakar, Senegal); Green Papaya (Manilla, Philippines); Ruangrupa (Jakarta, Indonesia) and Arizona State University (USA). She lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya.

Learn more on her personal and Project Websites: www.ROCCA.xyz and  www.britishcouncil.or.ke/east-africa-arts as well as www.artachat.org

The book mentioned in the interview is The Queer Art of Failure.

Jamming in the ‘Mobile Picture Salon’ a portable cinema that travels across Scotland, greeting people as it goes http://www.rocca.xyz/mobile-picture-salon
Performance artist Ife Piankhi in ‘Jump’: a video experiment exploring the confusion of moving and the hopelessness of belonging http://www.rocca.xyz/jump
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