Nunhead Cemetery Late

Join us for an evening of art, performance, music, and interactive experiences devised by the Goldsmiths community in response to Nunhead Cemetery.

As dusk falls on Nunhead Cemetery, masked performers emerge to honour the future dead, live music drifts between the headstones, and puppets process its paths.

IRIE! dance theatre will present a new site responsive performance with accompanying live drumming, drawing on African and Caribbean diasporic traditions.

With pizza by Dinner for One Hundred and drinks by Pure Cane. Suitable for all ages.

Provisional programme

Whispers Between Ruins
Experience the Cemetery through an immersive headphone soundscape of site-responsive live music, field recordings and pre-recorded compositions by Goldsmiths students.

Plastique Fantastique Summon Future-Dead-Selves
A masked performance will manifest Plastique Fantastique’s future-dead selves. Their ritual honours pre-Christian entities from the cemetery’s stone carvings and the Dissenters Movements associated with the cemetery.

Holos
A durational living sculpture grows from the ruined Anglican Chapel, created in collaboration with children from Ivydale Primary School. Artists Alexa Reid and Natasha Lohan explore the possibilities of ‘becoming porous’.

Listening Like a Tree
Have you ever wondered what the world sounds like to a tree? Visitors are invited to explore live-captured sounds from the tree’s under and overstory using a range of 3D-printed tools and specially adapted microphones.

Spring Weaving
A series of interactive, loom-like sculptures and accompanying soundscape invite visitors to weave the cemetery’s plants and flowers into a living tapestry.

Grief Houses
A procession of glowing ‘Grief Houses’ wander the cemetery. They remember all lost things that never had a funeral. Join the Grief Houses’ procession of puppetry and sound.

Uncommon Weevils
Artists Louise Ashcroft and Fritha Jenkins roam Nunhead Cemetery, playing the environment as a musical score. Ashcroft warbles its species, while Jenkins remixes words like a beetle breaking down bark.

Other Worlds
Local young artists from the Goldsmiths Alchemy Collective guide visitors through a site-specific, immersive music and spoken word performance, inviting them to tune into the stories buried beneath the soil.

Urban Nature Observatory
An interactive collage workshop to map the potential locations of DIY environmental and wildlife sensors. Explore what environmental data we should collect and how we can visualise it to become active ecological citizens.

The Wandering Cat
A wandering cat becomes a gentle guide between memory and presence. A performer weaves a soundscape, A 3D-printed cat glows when touched, Shadow puppets carry stories, and a VR experience lets visitors sit with strangers from the past.

This event is part of the Nunhead Cemetery East Lodge Restoration: From Ruin to Revival, and is produced in partnership with Southwark Council and Friends of Nunhead Cemetery (FONC). It is made possible by generous funding from the Heritage Fund.