19 March 2026

Doreen Massey: Voices of Places

Nathaniel Télémaque: A Kilburn Highroad Sense of Place, 2026

Voices of Places is an ongoing research collaboration that invites artists, residents and organisers to respond to the work of Doreen Massey (1944–2016) in collaboration with The Open University. As a radical geographer, feminist, theorist, political activist and long-standing Kilburn resident, Massey developed influential ideas on space, place, and power. Working with selected educative and political resources, this project reinterprets Massey’s ideas through visual culture to explore themes of displacement, resistance and belonging in London today.

Doreen Massey’s work was deeply interdisciplinary, publicly orientated and politically engaged. She collaborated with key figures in politics and visual culture, and co-founded Soundings – a journal – with Stuart Hall and Michael Rustin. In the aftermath of the 2007/8 global financial crisis, Soundings published The Kilburn Manifesto, a collection of essays together seeking to interpret the turbulence of the present and help support the kinds of cultural and political alternatives so urgently needed.

Massey’s significant personal connection to Kilburn, where she lived for many years, profoundly shaped her work. Her reflections on Kilburn High Road and the market —where Metroland Cultures is based— describe it as a site that cannot be understood “without bringing into play half the world and a considerable amount of British imperialist history”. Her geographical imagination inspired new ways of understanding the uneven relationships between places in a globally-connected world, always attentive to possible openings for social, cultural and political change.

Working directly with geographers at the Open University, this research project will create opportunities for artists, organisers, and local residents to engage with her archive materials and develop new bodies of work in dialogue with Massey, Kilburn and beyond.

Commissioned artists for 2025/26: Heiba Lamara, Francesca Telling and Nathaniel Télémaque.

Heiba Lamara/ The Kilburn Print Workshop

Heiba Lamara is an artist-researcher whose work explores independent print and archival practices. In particular she looks at zine-making and self-publishing as a methodological and material practice and organising tool to think across disciplines, ecologies and communities. She is Assistant Editor of OOMK (One of my Kind) a zine and publishing collective focused on the spiritual, political and artistic practices of women artists. Driven to provide accessible print spaces under austerity measures, she co-founded the community Risograph studio Rabbits Road Press in 2017.

In 2024 Heiba initiated The Kilburn Print Workshop dedicated to community publishing and print and design education. The project is inspired by the radical community print workshops and presses that flourished in North/West London during the 1970s and 80s, such as The Poster Workshop, Paddington Print Workshop, Copy Art and Crest Press. With the aim to reimagine and map out the landscape of community print and publishing in Kilburn today, the focus of the print workshop will move outwards from Metroland Studios, through to Kilburn Market, and onto the High Road.

Francesca Telling

kilbuFrancesca Telling is an artist and facilitator from London. Working in photography, print, language and time-based media, she is interested in how our knowledges of time and place are produced, between the spaces that care for people and the spaces that care for stories. Her practice centres on the lived and educational experiences of children and young people, developing through collaborations that use listening, documenting, mapping and interviewing as tools for reimagining the forms of hierarchy and separation found within systems young people navigate.

Francesca’s recent projects have emerged as gatherings, interventions and curriculums including facilitating the pilot Young Archivists programme at Croydon Archives, co-research with the collective A Particular Reality, and artworks now living in schools, youth clubs and bookshelves. Her first solo exhibition ‘Emergency’ was at Metroland Cultures in 2025.

Nathaniel Télémaque

Nathaniel Télémaque AKA St.Peso is a North West London-born and raised visual artist, writer and researcher who photographs, films, records and writes about ‘everyday things’ in various urban settings. Bearing witness to mad cities and maverick livelihoods inspires his audio-visual practices. His lenses focus on the experiences of young Black adults, creative peers and notions of urban change in cities. He completed his Geography (practice-related) PhD at University College London in 2023 and is now a Lecturer in Geography and Social Justice at King’s College London. As a member of the Pesolife Art Collective, he also produces and curates various projects with Pesolife collaborators Secaina Hudson & Kalina Blaize – who are both multi-talented singers, songwriters and music producers. Frequently collaborating on distinct projects together, the Pesolife Art Collective is committed to substantively engaging with its audio-visual practices alongside collaborations with educational institutions, companies, community groups, and creative peers.

Geographers at the Open University

Voices of Places started life as a collaborative research initiative among geographers at the Open University working together to keep thinking with the ideas of Doreen Massey. It is co-led by Colin Lorne, a social and political geographer who focuses on the geographies of crisis; Carry van Lieshout, a historical geographer with research interests in women’s working lives with a focus on archives and the stories and silences they contain; and Benjamin Newman, a historical and cultural geographer whose research focuses on the geographies of knowledge and communication. The overarching Massey project has been supported by seed funding from OpenSpace Research Centre, Open University.

Supported by Antipode Foundation, The Elephant Trust and Becoming Brent Community Fund through National Lottery Heritage Fund and Brent Council.

Kilburn Print Workshop – Heiba Lamara

The Kilburn Print Workshop is a commission with artist Heiba Lamara dedicated to community publishing and print and design education.

Kilburn Print Workshop – ‘Meet the Traders: Issue 01’