2026
Saturday 18 April
Day: Workshop
Dalston Library
Finding Your Seat at the Table
Navigating morality and compromise in the creative industries
Dalston CLR James Library, Dalston Square E8 3BQ
Doors 1.30pm
Workshop 2-4pm
A participatory workshop exploring how creative practitioners sustain their work while navigating institutions, independence and personal values. Drawing on their backgrounds in publishing and audio production/archiving, Sherif Dhaimish الشريف دهيميش and Olivia Melkonian Օլիվի Մելքոնեան invite participants to reflect on compromise, autonomy and what success looks like on their own terms. Through discussion, live polling and group exercises, the session will explore how creative careers are built across both independent and institutional contexts.
This event is supported by the OUTLANDS Network.
Buy tickets from Cafe Oto:
Festival pass £30 advance
Saturday day - Workshop (Dalston Clr James Library) £3 advance; £5 door
Buy solidarity tickets here:
Festival pass £60
Your support helps us continue to offer discounted tickets to those who need them. Thank you!
Your support helps us continue to offer discounted tickets to those who need them. Thank you!
Access:
This Dalston CLR James Library event is on the second floor, in the Meeting Room, with lift access and accessible, gender-neutral toilets.
We offer 2 for 1 tickets for guests’ carers.
We are more than happy to reserve you seats and/or space for a wheelchair.
To arrange any of the above, or if you have any questions to help make your visit more comfortable, please email us here.
Olivia Melkonian Օլիվիա Մելքոնեան is an audio producer, sound artist/archivist and DJ invested in cultural preservation. In exploring and documenting the Western Armenian experience, she uses audio to work with fragments of memory to reimagine and reconstruct what has been lost, forgotten and misremembered, addressing absences and epistemic gaps. Her practice uses sonic archiving to preserve associations of place and memory as a result of endangered histories, while questioning memory and knowledge formation. Olivia’s work preserves intangible cultural heritage, exploring how sound-based memory informs collective knowledge and sustains cultural continuity. Through acts of remembering, she considers how historical consciousness is carried into the present and informs contemporary modes of living, learning and connecting.