Lleah Smith works among ‘pedagogyartcuratorial’ relations.
A vibrant coming together of practice-led and theoretical work.

Within institutional spaces, this takes shape through the ‘para-pedagogical’ a practice of learning-beside.

Within her independent work, she explores the speculative potential of ‘M5’ — Fermentation as: material, metaphor, manners, method, and methodology. This is a leaky, porous and emergent framing for thinking, making and doing.

Smith is enlivened by the possibilities of bringing together diverse bodies across ages, cultures, and disciplines.

At the heart of her enquiries is a deep curiosity in how knowledges move…

She considers dialogical processes, hospitality and friendship as the foundational building blocks for radical and relational work.

Smith is interested in what ‘structures’ and ‘systems’ render and limit possibile forms.

She plays with productive agitation as a mode where discomfort becomes generative, where disturbance is transformative, and where conflict is held not to be solved but listened to.

Here, agitation is a living presence—a pulse, a force—through which collective processes open toward pressure, possibility, and relation.

She turns to queer, disability scholar and activist Mel Y. Chen (2018) in tending to this work, Chen asks “What might it mean to focus on the embodiment of agitation as a form of living presence... rather than on the strategies used to kill it?” (p. 551).