Confluence
Artists and thinkers explore the ever-changing landscape of Bristol city centre in new residency programme, Confluence.
Water dances through Bristol.
The city was built on the confluence of rivers – where the Avon and the Frome meet and begin their rush towards the sea. Smaller streams flow through each neighbourhood, often unseen in channels hidden by concrete.
Bristol is a place of change, with new ideas washing in and through – often very fast.
In a city that is constantly evolving, how do we find a moment to pause and reflect on this place? How do we make a little space for listening, for dreaming? What are the stories we can tell each other of what it’s like to live here, or to have lived here, or to imagine living here in the future?
Confluence is a residency programme, that explores the evolving currents of the city.
Curated and produced by MAYK and commissioned by Ginkgo Projects, we embarked on this journey in late 2023 with four exceptional artists – Asmaa Jama, Verity Standen, Travis Alabanza, and Ryan Convery-Moroney – who developed new ideas reflecting on Bristol’s rich identity. Their work, spanning film, performance, photography, and installation, was showcased in a weekend event in early December. Myth-making met romance met counter-culture met shopping. Audiences were invited to experience Bristol through personal lenses and contribute to a collective vision of its future.
As Confluence continued to evolve through 2024 and into 2025, a new wave of artists and thinkers joined the flow – Dhaqan Collective, Esther May Campbell, Howl Yuan, Ramelle Williams & Fenton Fleming, and Iman Sultan-West – uncovering fresh perspectives on the unseen and unheard in our changing city. At Mayfest 2024, children ran wild in urban forests, an arch made of ice challenged us to rethink the systems we depend on, and we opened a conversation about how art can help us navigate Bristol’s transformation. And since then we’ve been listening to the stories of taxi drivers, exploring what home means, and dancing through the city streets.
Confluence is a production by MAYK, commissioned by Ginkgo Projects for Redcliffe Wharf with the support of Grainger Plc, and for The Glassworks with the suport of Fresh.
From the Blog
Ramelle Williams and Fenton Fleming
Ramelle’s dance journey began in 2008 with Angels Dance Academy, where his team claimed second place at the ISAF Worlds—a moment that solidified his love for performance. During his time there, he also discovered my passion for teaching, leading dance classes and inspiring others to move.
After relocating to London, Ramelle found himself thriving in the competitive scene, winning battles like Breaking the Bay, World of Dance, What You Got, and Go Hard or Go Home. Each victory pushed him to refine his craft and deepen his connection to the art of dance.
His journey then brought him to Jukebox Collective, where he expanded his skills as a performer, teacher, and choreographer. Remelle performed in productions like Casablanca, choreographed his own original show, and developed innovative teaching methods to share knowledge with the next generation of dancers.
Dance isn’t just what he does—it’s who he is. From competitive battles to transformative performances, he’s constantly pushing boundaries, inspiring others, and evolving as an artist.
Fenton is a photographer and visual artist from Bristol. His collaborative work is rooted in vibrant and playful imagery, music, fashion, and dance, while his personal practice stretches more broadly in context, often with a more surreal and solemn tone. Across both, the subjects in his photography can be seen to inhabit a quiet beauty within exaggerated and distorted realities.
Fenton aims to show the charm and intrigue he finds in his subjects, while placing them in the larger realm of his interior worldview. One shaped by a wide range of experiences and influences — from dance styles like popping, krump, and breaking, to wider Hip Hop culture, music, design, architecture, and visual art. He’s particularly interested in ideas like afro-surrealism and the social production of space, which inform how he thinks about bodies, environments, and the atmospheres they generate.
Howl Yuan– Impossible Homecoming
Howl Yuan (he/him), is a Taiwanese performance maker, writer, and curator. Yuan’s practices focus on transcultural identity, mobility, space/place/site, and decolonised discourse. His works span different formats but are primarily performance-based, presenting at theatres, galleries, festivals, beaches or home gardens.
Yuan is also the co-host of Ming’s Strike, a monthly-update, ESEA arts podcast.
Dhaqan Collective- The People’s Carriage
Dhaqan Collective is led by Fozia Ismail and Ayan Cilmi. Their practice seeks to find ways of building imaginative futures that support Somali people here and in East Africa to resist the threats over our cultural heritage. The collective uses everyday materials, cassette tapes, food, and textiles, to create spaces of community, joy and healing that centre the full range of Somali diasporic experiences. Based in Bristol, they are residents of Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio and Spike Island Studio holders. Their work has been commissioned and presented by Watershed, Arnolfini, Counterpoint Arts, British Library, London School of Economics, Wellcome Collection, Serpentine Gallery, Sharjah Art Foundation, Southbank Centre, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Venice Architecture Biennal and the Weltmuseum in Vienna. In 2023 they received the WEVAA fellowship for their ongoing research into black feminist material cultures. Most recently they have been selected for Columbia University’s Digital Dozen Breakthroughs in Digital Storytelling 2024.
Esther May Campbell – 378,432,000,000 Seconds of Exposure
Born into a basket of witches cats a long, long time ago, Esther May Campbell has always been curious about image, story and mucking about.
Failing to run away with the circus, she got a job opening theatre curtains before moving on to serve Homity Pie in a cafe. In between double shifts, she watched films at The Prince Charles Cinema. Daylight revealed cinema seams and she began to wonder about stitching her own stories together.
In time, she started making moving and still pictures with friends, which have since been exhibited in streets, playgrounds and farms, internationally at film festivals, online and on broadcast TV. Her adventures included directing and writing film, Light Years, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and the multi-awarded BAFTA winning short, September, which played at over thirty festivals worldwide. While making low fi music videos she directed episodes of Channel 4’s SKINS and the BBC’s Wallander and more recently she co-created experimental films conjured with camera traps with local kids, entitled Anything Moving.
Her inaugural photography show at Bristol’s Old Shoe Factory, Out Of Darkness, grouped together intimate black & white prints and was to be followed up by Water Salad on Monday, an interactive, onsite show and publication at and about a farm in which the cared-for thrive through caring. Scrapbook, made up of workshops, a show and book, celebrated play and was commissioned by the legendary St Paul’s Adventure Playground with help from The Arts Council. When Covid struck, her weekly photo club adapted and sent out art care packages that became the Bewilderment Cards, now selling across the countyr. She has collaborated with The Cube Cinema on the Kids Kino Project, a cultural exchange for displaced children.
Dedicated to pursuing life-affirming art practices, Esther continues to tickle out bewitching images, moving stories and unforgettable live events. She’s still not very good at brushing her hair.
Asmaa Jama – A Song for the Slippages
I am thinking about converging tales in the city. I am exploring slippages, and glitches in the built environment. Rooting this tale in Stapleton Road, in a soundscape and performance, I am exploring the idea of a hidden or parallel world and the stories communities have carried with them. Using the magic realism of urban myths, this tale will reveal how porous our worlds are.
Asmaa is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and filmmaker based in Bristol. Their solo exhibition Except this time nothing returns from the ashes, made in collaboration with Gouled Ahmed, was presented at Spike Island, Bristol in 2023.
Jama's first film work Before We Disappear (2021), was an interactive moving image piece commissioned by BBC Arts, followed by The Season of Burning Things (2021), also made in collaboration with Ahmed, was commissioned by the Bristol Old Vic (2021).
Their work has also been presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale in collaboration with the Goethe Institute and Theatre Neumarkt’s 100 Ways to Say We Programme (2021), and was the official selection at Blackstar Film Festival, Aesthetica Film Festival and Sharjah Film Platform 5 (2022).
Jama’s writing has been commissioned by Jerwood Arts, Hayward Gallery, Arnolfini and Ifa Gallery, Berlin. Their written works have been published in places like The Poetry Review, Nataal and Magma. In theatre, they have written for, and are performing in, Dorothee Munyaneza’s Mailles, and have written for Radouan Mrziga’s Akal. They were a Film London FLAMIN fellow (2022); a resident artist at Somerset House Studios and a Barbican Young Poet.
Ryan Convery-Moroney – Playful Opportunists
My work explores the city’s urban counter-culture, most specifically the skater community who occupy ‘unloved’ spaces such as the Cumberland Basin and M32 underpass. Using film to document and interview the people who use those spaces, my project delves into self-governance, transience and how people help shape the city’s landscape.
Ryan is a Bristol-based young portrait and documentary photographer working with still and moving imagery. The foundation of his practice stems from an inherent connection to space and urban planning. He is interested in social structure, psychogeography, spatial practices and the multifaceted use of space. Particularly, Convery-Morony is interested in understanding how we observe, feel, act and behave accordingly to space due to our individual or collective knowledge, intentions and interests.
He was first drawn to photography through riding BMX where he also developed an appreciation of concrete, urban space and architecture. He went on to study photography at Portsmouth and has since relocated to Bristol, and was Artist in Residence with MAYK in 2021-22.
Travis Alabanza – Since We Last Kissed
I grew up in Bristol. Hillfields to be exact. A forgotten estate on the outskirts of the city. I discovered so many new parts of Bristol at the same time as discovering my queerness. New partners, serious ones or serious one-night-stands, would lead me to new alley ways, or clubs or parks. When I recently moved back to Bristol, it felt like everything had changed, and also had stayed the same. It felt so familiar yet distant. So, I reached out to some people I have kissed, and we recreated that kiss at a spot of Bristol we cared about, and I asked them: “how has Bristol changed since we last kissed?”
Travis Alabanza is an award-winning writer, performer and theatre maker. Born in Bristol and recently relocated back to the city, Travis is fascinated by how the city is changing and about the things that will never change. Their work is often focused on live interaction, untraditional participants within art, and queerness.
Their writing has appeared in the BBC, Guardian, Vice, Gal-Dem, in numerous anthologies including Black and Gay In the UK, and previously had a fortnightly column in the metro. After being the youngest recipient of the artist in residency program at Tate Galleries, Alabanza debut show Burgerz toured internationally to sold out shows in Southbank Centre, Sao Paulo Brazil, HAU Berlin and won the Edinburgh Fringe Total Theatre award in 2019. In 2020 their theatre show Overflow debuted at the Bush Theatre to widespread acclaim and later streamed online in over 22 countries, and most recently their new show Sound of the Underground was staged by the Royal Court in London last year. Their work surrounding gender, trans identity and race has been noted internationally, giving talks at universities including Oxford, Harvard, Bristol and more.
Noted for their distinct voice, in 2019 the Evening Standard listed them as one of the 25 most influential under 25-year-olds, as well as being listed in the Dazed100, guardian asking if 'they are the future of theatre' and recently being listed on the Forbes30Under30List.
Verity Standen – There You Go, Lovely
I have been working in residence at The Galleries shopping centre: getting to know the people who work there and pass through; recording interviews with shopworkers, cleaners, security guards and visitors; digging into the history of the shops and how they have changed over time. I have begun weaving these conversations into music – layering people's words and historical information about the shop units (along with a handful of tripadviser reviews) into a set of vocal pieces.
Verity Standen is an artist, composer and choir leader. Her work focuses on the human voice - gathering people together to sing, and exploring different ways that people can experience music. She likes to play with voices in ways that ask us to listen differently. Her projects take a range of forms – concerts, theatre pieces, films, installations, community events – but they always start with the voice.
A lot of Verity's work explores the relationship between live music and intimacy, such as HUG (2013), Symphony (2016) and Undersong (2018). For Mayfest 2022 she created polyphony, a swirling sound installation featuring recorded voices of people across the country. Verity also works in partnership with communities to create projects for specific environments, including Island Duets (2023, with singers on the Isle of Mull), Voices of Worle (2019, with community elders in Weston-super-Mare) and Refrain (2017, with male choirs in sites connected to conscientious objection).
Photography by Paul Blakemore. Film by Helm Films
Some beautiful photos from Impossible Homecoming last weekend…