An open kitchen for social art making, in which everyone is invited to bring and take from the table. Using food sharing as a core approach, participants are all each other's guests and hosts. 

The Potluck kitchens are designed to bring together people who would never otherwise break bread - and to harness this diversity to kickstart new conversations about the future of our plural cities.

The Potluck cooks up new approaches to socially engaged art making in terms of practitioner tools and open organisational structures. A Potluck offers contemporary, practitioner-centred training to those working in community and participatory arts, and explores community building, creative placemaking and activism.

Potlucks run online as well as offline, to extend and capture the conversations. motiroti offers ongoing support to Potluck nodes, aiming to connect Potluck activity across different cities and continents, enabling practitioners to connect, compare and collaborate internationally.

The Potluck was launched in Chicago in 2011/12, where motiroti is the resident company for the Critical Encounters programme at Columbia College Chicago. Local partners included The Dorchester Project, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and the En Las Tablas Performing Arts Center. motiroti is actively seeking collaborators in other cities who may wish to open a kitchen in their neighbourhoods.

A live installation with edible interludes

Journeys of Love and More Love is the story of a man – and many men - the milestones in his life journey and the key people that influenced his development across continents and in between social and cultural divides. The show is a 1-hour performance mixing projected media and a threecourse meal as a live installation. The story is the personal tale of Ali Zaidi’s migration journeys from Bombay to Lahore to London chronicling the loves and lives of his friends and family and the food he encountered along the way. It intersperses personal and public archive images and historical events with interview footage of contemporary migrant stories in Naples and London, ranging from academics to streetsellers, business entrepreneurs to illegal workers.

By fusing his own experience with the life of migrant people encountered throughout his life, motiroti’s Artistic Director Ali Zaidi opens up wider questions about identity and the sense of belonging in a world where things are constantly on the move – the incessant fluctuation between being a guest and being at home. Ali Zaidi says: “Indian by birth, Pakistani by migration and British by chance, I like to draw upon this cultural displacement to pursue creative explorations of commonality and difference.”

Warm, colourful and yet melancholic, Journeys of Love and More Love unfolds stories of cultural and geopolitical mobility and displacement, where ‘love’ is the driving force that allows questions to be asked and connections to be made.

Trailer from London presentation

Trailer from Naples presentation

Sixty one-minute film commissions

Fresh artistic voices that go behind the headlines and beyond the rhetoric

The first 360° programme, 60x60 Secs presents sixty one-minute films commissioned by motiroti via an open submission. Established and emerging artists from the South Asian Diaspora – twenty each from Britain, India and Pakistan – present their personal perspective on what ‘home and boundaries’ mean to them.

Using a wide and highly creative variety of media and techniques, the films uncover new voices and images, presenting comic, unsettling and arresting stories of everyday life and global events; a very different angle than the one commonly projected by the media.

60x60 Secs premiered as a multi-screen installation at Shunt and Vibe Gallery in London, UK and has had international presentations and screenings in India, Pakistan and Dubai. It has been screened within film festivals in Australia, Canada, Germany, Singapore and United States.

Individual films have been nominated in films festivals. Great Identity Swindle by Yam Boy won Best Short Film, Asian Festival of 1st Films (AFFF), Singapore and  Best Short, Satyajit Ray Foundation Award. 505 by Juhi Jaferi, Komail Naqvi and Taimoor Tariq won Impact Award, Ivey Film Festival 2009, Ontario.

The project continues to be shown as installations and one-off screenings with talks.

www.360degrees.tv

a digital arts installation

presenting unheard stories of the young people of Islington

Amaze artists comprise over forty young people aged between 14-19 from a variety of backgrounds who worked with professional facilitators to explore their personal identities through the creation of short films, poems, ?self-portraits, mixed media images and live interventions. Some have told stories of their own lives, others have taken fragments and moments from the world around them and brought these carefully selected snap shots together to create some powerful and exciting pieces of work.

On 4^th July at Highbury Fields Festival, all the works were showcased in a specially commissioned gallery.

On 25^th October a special screening was held at Islington Town Hall along with a ceremony to celebrate the young talent.

Amaze is produced by motiroti in association with Listen Up with funding support from Cripplegate Foundation, Arts Council England and Islington Council.

View the film Amaze... the making of

Dedicated micro site www.motiroti.com/amaze

Multi-site project featuring video and graphic installations in and around Exhibition Road.

An extraordinary combination of multimedia art, prestigious museum collections and secret archives: a multi-layered project in which the voices of individuals and institutions merged in surprising and unexpected ways.

Commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery and the Exhibition Road Cultural Group, Priceless engaged with over 250 local people invited from the City of Westminster and Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea.

During six one-day participatory 'Roadshows' objects of great value offered by the partner institutions inspired imaginative journeys around the notion of 'priceless' where participants shared their unique stories and memories through film and sound.

Priceless resulted in video installations, mobile exhibitions, a graphic installation in the South Kensington Underground foot tunnel, artist-led guided tours and a large scale public launch event on Exhibition Road.

To view details from the various aspects of the roadshows; launch event; installations, mobile units and guided tours - click here.

Artistic Director

Ali Zaidi

Concept and Development

Ali Zaidi, Poulomi Desai, Daniel Saul

Video

Daniel Saul

Sound and Music

Poulomi Desai

Producer

Penny Andrews

Learning Director

Janice Galloway

Administrator

Alison Bean

Production Management

Johnny Goodwin, for JOULE

Video triptych filmed in six cities of the world

Filmed in Auckland, Cape Town, London, Mumbai, New York and Singapore, cutout invokes the sensory overload of today's urban civilization. Figures swirl against deconstructed images of their cities, each with its unique palette of light, colour, sounds and semiotics.

This video unfolds a dialogue between the urban fabric and new cultural influences, and plays with the private sphere, the expression of the human body and public space. cutout is a video triptych, shown as an installation in galleries; cutout II is a single screen version, shown on BBC Big Screens in urban centres in major UK cities and television broadcasts.

In September 2006 cutout II was selected by the Mayor's Thames Festival as the only outdoor large-scale projection onto the National Theatre's Lyttelton flytower. Streams of images and blasts of colour from the flytower reached out to Londoners and was visible from many locations. The view from Waterloo Bridge was spectacular!

Bangalore London New York

... on the flying carpet of media and technology

A large-scale cross media performance created by motiroti and New York-based company The Builders Association.

Alladeen draws on the lives of people living in the global cities of New York, London, and Bangalore—each a city where many cultures collide, both in virtual and material reality. Aladdin's story is a perfect vehicle for this "collision" since it is one that has been revised and re-told many times. This archetypal rags-to-riches story has travelled from Asia, to India, to England, to America, and each culture has borrowed, stolen, and reinterpreted it from the last. Similarly, the interaction of ethnicity and cultures within these sprawling metropolises blurs the line between identities, and reflects how cultures reinterpret each other's signs and stories. Alladeen traces a technological Silk Route, dissonantly mixing the global and the local in a shifting map of cultural identity. Finally, the collaboration between motiroti and The Builders Association on this project represents our own modest experiment in cultural collision.

Aladdin's fantasy of personal transformation is played out in the surreal world of Bangalore's "call centres," telemarketing centres where Indian operators learn how to "pass" as Americans. Exploring the paradoxes of identity in an age of multiple realities—the story of Aladdin is also particularly resonant for our consumerist culture in that the tale focuses on class, wealth, social status, and the fantasy of transformation: transformation of the self through acquisition and consumerism, and transformation of ordinary objects (a lamp and a ring, for instance) into manifestations of the sublime. The story can equally function as a fable about a young person's ability to land on his feet throughout a process of continual social and personal displacement.

The Alladeen project had three manifestations, all sourcing from the same material: the website, a music video, and a cross media stage performance.

Concept

Keith Khan, Marianne Weems and Ali Zaidi

Performance Directed by Marianne Weems

Website and Music Video Directed by Ali Zaidi

Detailed credits for all the three aspects of the production are available as a downloaded. Do visit the website!

A provocative gallery installation scrutinizing British Asian identity

A blend of photography, soundscapes and digital media exploring cultural representations of being Asian in Britain. Three contrasting artists worked closely with over 80 participants to produce new, cleverly manipulated images and sounds of people describing themselves as British Asian; the resulting 'definitions' were aspirational, arresting, controversial, humorous and critical.

Fresh Masaala artist Poulomi Desai explored personal identity through a cacophony of sounds that embraced a range of dialects and languages from Urdu, Punjabi, French and English.

Zineb Sidera looked at the process of communication, censorship and experiences of being a migrant.

Ali Zaidi morphed portraits of participants asking: Do all Asians look the same? The definition of 'curry' was extended by presenting 26 different recipes and spices in neatly wrapped sachets.

Fresh Masaala visitors were invited to contribute their own images, ideas and responses during the presentation at the Mead Gallery and the content of the installations thereby continuously evolved.