DARCH
DARCH is the collaborative practice of Umulkhayr Mohamed and Radha Patel formed in March 2023, and a culmination of 6 years of work individually, but alongside each other. As DARCH, our practice is rooted in ritual and the sacredness of our connections to land, ancestors, and spirit. Our creative practice begins with holding closed ceremonies, gathering in intentional spaces that invite the guidance of plants, the land, and our ancestors. Alongside this, we explore archives and engage in conversations, between ourselves and with our wider community, both of which help us unearth and shape the voice of our work. These conversations are essential—they are not just dialogue but a form of research, guiding us to understand what our work wants to communicate, embody, and offer to others.
Our process centres on the shared elements of our individual practices—ritual, shrine-making, and relationship to the land. Sound work, storytelling, and open exchange form the foundation of our approach, allowing us to foster a creative space that transcends the human and honours a more-than-human world. This orientation reflects our commitment to animism and ancestral honouring, as well as our commitment to prefigurative politics, that is a deliberate experimental implementation of desired future social relations and practices in the here-and-now.
Artworks:
grief/rage ritual
Film |
9 mins 33 seconds | Arcade Campfa Digital Residency
Grief and rage, despite being characterised as unruly/undesirable emotions, are in fact indicators of health within a global structure of racial capitalism & cisheteronormative patriarchy, which shame us into disconnecting from our bodies in moments of intense feeling, as a way to position our bodies' intense capacity to feel, and are inherently unsafe and unproductive.
Through exploratory conversations and archival research, we created our own grief/rage ritual that explores the relationship between grief and rage, using vocal embodiment and sound as a healing entity. The ritual centres the experiences of both queer people of colour and the more than human, creating a container that holds a process of releasing misplaced shame that is connected to grief and rage and exploring how giving ourselves the space to feel grief and rage may bring about renewed connection to our liberation.
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Ruux Kholvawala (soul openers) mask technology
Ceramic Sculptures
The Ruux Kholvawala or ‘Soul Openers’ are 3 ceramic masks handmade by DARCH. They take inspiration from ceremonial masks and are used to communicate with the spirits of earth to translate their pain, grief, joy and teachings to the human world. In performances one mask is worn by Umulkhayr, one by and Radha and the other is offered to the spirits. In this way, we challenge and reject a common narrative in climate activism that the Earth needs 'saving' or that the duty of humans is to ‘save’ the Earth. Instead we believe that we must respect the Earth’s agency by first asking what it wants and respond to its needs before making assumptions.
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We are Healers/We are Builders Performance
Filmed Performance | 25 mins | Performed in FACT Gallery Liverpool
‘We Are Builders / We Are Healers’ is an immersive audio story and performance piece following Umulkhayr, Radha and the Ruux Kholvawala or ‘Soul Openers’ - ceramic masks made to communicate with the underground and translate its pain, grief, joy and teachings to the human world.
This performance serves as a prologue to the Liverpool Biennial commission we will be working on throughout this residency, and showcases the first conversation between Umulkhayr, Radha and the Bedrock which, upon breaking, releases sounds of Grief and Rage which are then translated into a tender conversation via the Ruux Kholvawala.
Through this conversation Umulkhayr and Radha learn about their human duty, which is to unlearn human supremacy, in order to build deep connections between humans and more than human beings. Only then can we heal the wounds that humans have caused, without becoming martyrs. It is a dialogue about climate grief, justice and how death can bring us closer to each other and help us fulfil our part in a sacred cycle.
Future Works:
DARCH were commissioned to make new work ‘Heaven in the Ground’ for the Liverpool Binneial 2025, that will be opening early June 2025.
They are also working on developing ‘You Have Done this Before’ a interaction exhibition
co-produced with local young people creating a coming of age ritual that explores what it means to become an adult during a climate crisis, that is funded by Unlimited and will be opening in Ty Pawb gallery in Spring 2026. The artists are keen to tour the work once the exhibition at Ty Pawb comes to a close and welcome enquires related to this.
