The Artist Takeover programme is designed to nurture mid-career artists who want to explore working at an epic scale in the South Warehouse at Aviva Studios. Each collective is given financial support of up to £10,000, dedicated guidance from the Factory International team and a week in the space to explore and realise their idea. But what is the experience really like?

Writer and storyteller afshan d’souza-lodhi, who was selected for the South Asian Artist Takeover alongside director Gitika Buttoo, talks us through her day-to-day experience.

Good enough to try, safe enough to fail. 

I’m a writer. Which usually means I spend my days playing with sentences and my nights wondering if the sentences are playing with me. I’ve written for traditional theatre, roamed the streets with promenade performances and even popped up in unexpected corners. But this takeover at Factory International? It was a whole new species of creative chaos. And I loved it.

Factory International gave me something I don’t often get in institutions. Freedom. Not just the ‘do-what-you-like-but-within-these-guidelines’ kind. The scary, liberating kind where I didn’t have to come armed with a polished script or neat little characters. Just an idea. A seed. A provocation. And an air fryer. (Yes. We asked for one. The next day, it was there. Magic.)

We were held so well by the team. If we wanted to experiment, they made it happen. There was no sense of ‘stay in your lane.’ I got to take off the writer hat and wear about a dozen others. We had the brilliant Richard Gregory as our mentor and dramaturg, who gently nudged us to let go of the need to make something ‘complete’. He reminded us that incompleteness is sometimes where the real stuff lives.

Before We Even Began

This takeover idea had been brewing for months. What started as a piece interrogating privilege turned into something far wilder. Gitika and I, after a few deliciously difficult conversations with Richard and Kee Hong Low, tore the original plan to shreds and salvaged only the juicy parts. Naming privilege felt too easy. What you do with it, now that’s the interesting part.

We were fascinated by how people behave in groups when thrown into game dynamics. What gets revealed? What gets hidden? Who leads? Who follows? Who freezes? We wanted to build a social experiment meets performance that not only poked at those behaviours but gave people space to sit with their why. Why did I act like that? Why did I stay quiet? Why did that moment shake me or provoke me? What does this all say about me and how I show up in different spaces?

To hold all of that safely, we brought in a slimmed-down version of the Deep Democracy process. We worked with Paul Connery and Liz Mytton, two incredible facilitators with experience in trauma-informed practices, anti-oppression work, and a little bit of shamanic practice for good measure. We wanted to provoke but not harm. Push but also hold.

Day One: An Empty Box

The North Warehouse is vast. Big enough to lose yourself in and dramatic enough to dream in. On the first day we entered the space, it was just us and a roll of tape. We marked out the stations on the floor. Then the lights came in. Then barriers. By the end of the day, each station stood like a little island, lit just right to invite curiosity or dread. Phil Buckley, our lighting designer and production manager, helped us carve out these emotional zones.

That night, I watched Hamlet Hail to the Thief in the North Warehouse next-door. Suit jackets fell from the ceiling and reminded me that the only real limit is our imagination.

Day Two: The Setup

This was our first real day in the space. We had ten stations to build and, with the help of set designer Hannah Sibai and stage manager Phil Clack, we dressed them like characters. Each with its own mood and agenda.

I finally wrote a script for our host Tom Bass, who’d be guiding participants through the maze. Gitika and I walked the space like protective parents, rehearsing every beat. This space, which had felt intimidating the day before, now felt like home. Our weird little warehouse living room. We left buzzing with energy and excitement to share a version of this with others.

Day Three: The First Sharings

There is no other way to describe how I felt in the morning apart from panic. I arrived at 8am with nervous energy. Costumes were fitted, actors Lubna Saleh and Elliot Hughes tackled their (somewhat weird) briefs with grace, and we opened our doors.

The first groups were made up of Factory staff, so the energy was soft, generous. I facilitated the first Deep Democracy session with Paul. It was tough. I didn’t want to lead the conversation too much but also wanted it to mean something. It’s hard to let go. To trust the process. To accept that what doesn’t come up maybe isn’t ready to yet. Most of the conversations had centred around accessibility and sensory deprivation. Important things, but not the core of what we were trying to explore. So for the next group, we scrapped all sensory deprivation elements.

That second experiment felt off. Something was missing. But it gave us a chance to see how group dynamics worked when the tasks were simpler. We talked ethics. Boundaries. How to hold people without leading them. We reminded ourselves that the goal isn’t to engineer the perfect conversation. It’s to make space for real ones.

After both sharings, we had another big conversation. What is it we want from this experience? What do we want people to leave with? What is the story we are telling? Weirdly, in most traditional theatre spaces these are the questions I would ask first while writing a script. We decided we would need to shake the whole thing up.

Day Four: My Birthday

For almost a decade now, I have spent the day of my birthday out of the country basking in sun on a beach. This year, I was in a warehouse with no natural light. Still got a caterpillar cake though (thanks Pete and Simaran).

We moved the stations again. And again. We integrated, restructured, rewrote. We laughed. A lot. One of the spaces we created, a live art piece called Colonialism in a Cage, brought us pure glee. It was provocative, yes. But also full of layered, weird beauty. And fun. Did I mention this whole takeover was really fun?

Day Five: The Last Day

I woke up feeling joy. Pure, uncomplicated joy. We had three sharings left. This time, we let ourselves play.

With each sharing we changed something. This was our opportunity to really test what we were doing. For two of the sharings, we even cut one station completely (which had an interesting effect on the participants, who were walking past a station they didn’t interact with). In between each reset, we had a quick debrief about what worked well, and we just went with it.

The groups were mostly strangers. Things went wrong, people were challenged. On one occasion someone left the space midway through. But all of it came together in those deep democracy spaces. It gave people a moment to really reflect on who they are, how they show up and the impact they have on other people. It allowed people to really ask themselves what it takes to build community. It was everything we’d hoped for and more.

We ended the day exhausted.