A Raybel Charters 'Culture Cargo' event for the Totally Thames Festival. Onboard Sailing Barge Raybel
Billie Duch Gimenez - Our Personal Ballast
Ballast (the material used to weigh down a boat) is weird, both a commodity (could be sold) and a non-commodity (was often just waste, and disposed of as such). Studying historical ballasting practices, especially those of the Thames, tells us a lot about a society built on trade, extraction and expansion. What if we used it to talk about how we build communities? What's our personal ballast? What grounds us? Is it steady? Where do we take it from? If we dispose of it what are we leaving behind? A general intro on the history will be followed by a creative exercise where we discuss these questions, then cut, paste, and arrange images and text to give shape to our ideas.
Billie Duch Gimenez is a museum curator and researcher who has worked at the British Museum and Museum of the Home.
Be Manzini - The River Between Us
A live poetry performance exploring the Thames as witness, collaborator, archive and living body. Through a sequence of original poems, Be will invite audiences to consider the river not simply as a route for trade or transport, but as a keeper of memory—holding stories of migration, colonialism, labour, ecology, belonging and change, including environmental justice, cultural exchange, movement, displacement, regenerative futures and our evolving relationship with the natural world. The performance will culminate in the premiere of a new improvised poem, created in dialogue with a voyage on the Raybel.
Be Manzini is a writer and speaker who is the founder of the Newham Poetry Prize. She has been resident at the Southbank Centre, and is a the director of Caramel Film Club, spotlighting Black talent and supporting diversity.
Her published work appears in various anthologies and she has been commissioned to write for the Theatre Royal, Hoxton Hall, Autograph B, Tamasha; as well as performing for leading poetry organisations such as Apples & Snakes.
Find Raybel at Royal Docks Management Authority, King George V Lock, Fishguard Way, London E16 2RG
What 3 Words ///wakes.wisely.face