Volt Gallery, Eastbourne
do step on each other’s toes brings together a series of workshop imagery for an exhibition structured around simple collective actions developed by artists Eva Louisa Jonas and Kairo Urovi with young people in Eastbourne.
Working with bodies, everyday objects and the camera, participants negotiate acts of balancing, holding, following and falling that can only unfold in relation to others. Photography operates here less as a means of documentation than as a site where interactions are playful, where gestures and materials co-make the image.
Emerging through these shared exercises are conversations around collage, assemblage and queerness, drawing on practices of queer community building as both a way of gathering and a material approach. Here, assemblage becomes a way of thinking through these relationships, opening the possibility of bodies and objects to become images.
The works sit in wooden frames, created by queer carpentry group In Our Hands. Ledges hold objects necessary for the actions, and ‘prompt cards’ invite reflections on the encounters made together.
Part of the Queer Grounds Programme
Queer Grounds is a free programme of LGBTQ+ friendly creative workshops for young people aged 16 – 25 led by photographers Eva Louisa Jonas and Kairo Urovi delivered by Photoworks in partnership with the Devonshire Collective.
The programme invites young people to explore how LGBTQ+ communities have created alternative ways of coming together that are rooted in care, community, and collective action.
Participants use image-making to investigate collectivity as something living and connecting, visualising how people prop each other up, negotiate roles, navigate tensions, and sustain one another over time, approaching photography as a way of working within collective processes rather than observing them from the outside.
Generously supported by the Chalk Cliff Trust.
This exhibition is presented as part of Tessa Boffin: Where We Touch The Archive.
