Book tickets
The revolution starts with listening.
What stories live in the gaps? What can silence teach us about Black heritage, memory, and erasure? And what practices of listening can support repair, remembrance, and connection?
Join HOUSE OF DREAD for their annual gathering, Thinking Wid Silence – an evening of reflection and resonance exploring how silence shapes Black histories, cultural memory, and collective inheritance.
HOUSE OF DREAD is an anti-disciplinary heritage studio dedicated to the preservation and activation of histories connected to the African and Caribbean diaspora. This evening extends their ongoing work to honour what has been silenced or erased, while creating new ways of listening, remembering, and being in relation.
From keynote reflections and lightning talks to sound system installations and performances, the programme brings together artists, thinkers, and community members who each engage with memory as a liberatory practice – using sound, word, and silence to connect across lands, lineages, and generations.
Keynote:
Phoebe Boswell – Artist and Filmmaker
Lightning Speakers:
Akil Scafe-Smith – RESOLVE Collective
Desiree Reynolds – Dig Where You Stand
Shepherd Manyika – Artist & Academic
Sound System Activation:
Jah Youth Sound System
What stories live in the gaps? What can silence teach us about Black heritage, memory, and erasure? And what practices of listening can support repair, remembrance, and connection?
Join HOUSE OF DREAD for their annual gathering, Thinking Wid Silence – an evening of reflection and resonance exploring how silence shapes Black histories, cultural memory, and collective inheritance.
HOUSE OF DREAD is an anti-disciplinary heritage studio dedicated to the preservation and activation of histories connected to the African and Caribbean diaspora. This evening extends their ongoing work to honour what has been silenced or erased, while creating new ways of listening, remembering, and being in relation.
From keynote reflections and lightning talks to sound system installations and performances, the programme brings together artists, thinkers, and community members who each engage with memory as a liberatory practice – using sound, word, and silence to connect across lands, lineages, and generations.
Keynote:
Phoebe Boswell – Artist and Filmmaker
Lightning Speakers:
Akil Scafe-Smith – RESOLVE Collective
Desiree Reynolds – Dig Where You Stand
Shepherd Manyika – Artist & Academic
Sound System Activation:
Jah Youth Sound System
Bios
HOUSE OF DREAD is an anti-disciplinary heritage studio. Part-archive, part-lab, part-community, committed to honouring what has been silenced or erased while imagining new futures.
Our work reshapes historical storytelling by centring Black and diasporic memory across research, heritage, sound, and community practice. We treat the archive not as something fixed, but as a living space of inquiry, collective memory, refusal, and re-imagination.
HOUSE OF DREAD produces public programmes, exhibitions, residencies, and sound-based activations rooted in diasporic traditions of reasoning, reflection, and resistance, creating spaces of care, cultural learning, and collective inheritance.
Phoebe Boswell is interested in the liminal space between our collective histories and imagined futures; how we see ourselves and each other, and, consequently, how we free ourselves, or imagine freedom. Her figurative and interdisciplinary practice adopts an errant, diasporic framework, moving intuitively across media from drawing and painting to film, video, sound, and writing, to create immersive installations which affect and are affected by the environments they occupy, by time, gestalt, the layering of sound, the serendipity of loops, and the presence of the audience. Often inviting the participation of volunteers to create a nuanced collective voice in the making process, Boswell’s work investigates themes including protest, reclamation, grief, intimacy, migration, the body and its world-making. Her recent work considers the dichotomy of bodies of water as both repositories of painful historical experience and sites of renewal and hope.
Akil Scafe-Smith is a director of RESOLVE Collective, an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology, and art to address social challenges. They have delivered numerous projects, workshops, publications, and talks in the UK and across the world, all of which look toward realising just and equitable visions of change in our built environment. RESOLVE are currently the commissioned artists as part of a forthcoming group exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, resident artists at Camberwell Space, part of University Arts London, and have recently completed exhibitions at Tate Liverpool and the Design Museum and have co-created community spaces with young people in Nelson with In-Situ in Pendle, and residents in Angell Town in Brixton.
Desirée Reynolds is a writer, editor, broadcaster and creative facilitator based in Sheffield. Her writing is rooted in working-class Black British experience and shaped by a commitment to anti-racism, archival recovery, and radical care. As Writer-in-Residence at Sheffield Archives, Desirée brings a unique perspective on storytelling, remembrance, and the power of reclaiming hidden histories. Her voice will deepen our conversation on memory, witness, and what it means to honour lives marked by state violence and structural neglect.
Shepherd Manyika is a London-based artist-educator whose works take on multiple formats and mediums. He is interested in memory, place, space and repair as forms of restoration, themes such as workshopping, play, music and sound are utilized in his practice to create transformative art spaces.
Jah Youth Sound System (often called Jah Youth “Roots Ambassador” Sound System) is one of the foundational London-based reggae sound systems rooted in Rastafari culture, community education, and spiritual upliftment.
Founded in the 1970s, the sound system emerged from grassroots West Indian communities in London and has become known for Deep roots & culture selections (rather than dancehall or commercial reggae). Conscious message music grounded in Rastafari teachings. Intergenerational stewardship -many members are the children and grandchildren of the founding family, Community-led events focused on social learning, healing and collective grounding and providing a spiritual space not just entertainment.
Book tickets
06:30 pm
Tue, 02 Dec 2025
Stage
Ticket information
- All tickets that do not require ID (full price, disabled, income support) can be printed at home or stored in email
- For aged-based concession tickets (under 25, student) please bring relevant ID to collect at the front desk before the event.
If ticket price is a barrier to attendance, please email Eray Yilmaz, Assistant Producer, Talks and Engagement Programme: Eray.Yilmaz@ica.art
Members+ and all Patrons gain free entry to all cinema screenings, exhibitions, talks, and more.
Join today as a Member+ for £25/month.
no. 236848.