Hip Hop Pedagogy – reclaim the archive

SHAY D

Shay D hails from North London, her upbringing forming the core of her sound. The Persian lyricist, an unafraid rule breaker, led the first ever all female Hip Hop tour in the UK. She effortlessly crosses genres, from Grime to Hip Hop to Spoken Word, with her fiery delivery and unapologetic lyricism, and high energy performances.

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Shay's Residency

BIG ZUU

Big Zuu swapped his university course in social work with music once his rap career began to blow up on the back of a string of self-released singles. He is all about empowering young people, and sees his music ‘basically as youth work on a bigger scale’. Big Zuu’s TV career begun in 2019 when UKTV’s channel Dave commissioned him to front a food programme ‘Big Zuu Eats’.

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Big Zuu's Residency

AWATE

Rapper originally from Eritrea, raised in Camden / London, AWATE’s music weaves together psychedelic melodies with sharp, witty lyrics. AWATE recently won the British Library's BL Labs’ artistic award for his ‘The Unearthed Odyssey’ Unlock Our Sound Heritage piece. The genre-bending conceptual Afrofuturist album was created using the sound archive's samples.

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AWATE's Residency

The Patterns We Made is a visual album by poet Zia Ahmed, produced by Hossam Fazulla. The album tackles issues of social justice, and identity in the times of the pandemic.

A collaborative residency project looking at how Hip Hop artists can speak back to the Archive in order to decolonise and re-connect cultural histories, insert new and retrieve silenced voices.