Siana Bangura

As an artist of migrant descent, I am necessarily pre-occupied with issues of race, class, gender and their many intersections. My work and practice are multi-discplinary and multi-layered, with a vast portfolio of work addressing climate justice, the arms trade, Tech Justice, state violence, and alternative governances. In this season of my work I am deeply engaged in beauty, power, and wonder of water as a source of inspiration, a metaphor for life, a central character in mythology and folklore, and as a more than human teacher. 

As a poet, my first body of work – my debut collection of poetry, ‘Elephant’, was a meditation on Black British womanhood and girlhood, and a testimony to the power of mothers in all of us. The motif of the elephant has been present in my work throughout the last decade, due to its associations with memory, maternal lineage, fertility, altruism, loyalty, and wisdom. It is also said that elephants are associated with water and rainfalls, which is a fortuitous bridge to this current season of my work where I am preoccupied with bodies of water.

My multi-award-winning play, ‘Swim, Aunty, Swim!’ is a world in which water plays a central role in healing, ritual, and rebirth. ‘Swim!’ is a story centring the lives of seasoned, mature West African women, in their prime, who are navigating complexities in their own lives, learning how to hold the darkness and the light all at once through their own struggles with grief and loss in different forms. Theirs is a journey of coming back home to oneself, and learning that you’re never too old to be reborn, to reinvent yourself, to find yourself again, to change and transition.

The pedestrian world collides with the spiritual and our watery world is full of rituals, small and large. Our Aunties learn to swim very literally, thanks to their kind and patient young swimming instructor, Danny, but also mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, pushing through the tides with the help of one another.

The world of ‘Swim!’ is one I plan to continue building and developing, working on not only the remount of the theatre production but also a novel and hopefully visual offerings for future film work.