Musician and Artist Love Ssega to Collaborate With National Gallery for HOME-ZERO: A Climate for Change

Musician and Activist Love Ssega is teaming up with the National Gallery and Nesta to create live events that tackle climate justice with HOME-Zero: A Climate for Change.

Love Ssega is a musician, artist, and current Arts Foundation Music For Change Fellow 2022. Having started as the original frontman of Clean Bandit, Love Ssega has gone on to work with Philharmonia Orchestra, tour China as a Musician in Residence for British Council and PRS Foundation and release music with Parisian fashion house Kitsuné. As a visual artist, he has collaborated with Slow Factory in New York and is part of their debut MoMA PS1 exhibition.

In recent years, he has turned his considerable talents to campaigning for climate justice. As a culmination of this activist work, Love Ssega will be collaborating with the National Gallery X (National Gallery and King's College London) and Nesta to create Love Ssega's HOME-Zero. The aim of Love Ssega's HOME-Zero is to highlight the connections between the climate emergency and the social housing crisis and to bring Londoners together to dream up ways of tackling this. Key to the project is the principle that live performance and art can be used as a catalyst for change and that community and collective goals can have the power to influence society.

Love Ssega says about the project, 'it is timely, in a cost of living crisis caused by our structural addiction to fossil fuels, that a commission such as HOME-Zero shows that musicians and artists can tackle these questions with the backing of our big cultural institutions. I'm excited to bring different voices into the National Gallery and to show that climate action should be creative, positive and uplifting'.

Love Ssega's HOME-Zero consists of two events at National Gallery; a workshop involving Londoners aged 18-35 years and a promenade performance tackling climate justice and a call for more sustainable social housing. Specially commissioned upcycled instruments created by Falmouth-based designer Dominick Allen for Award-winning Shadwell Ensemble will be integral to the events.

The live performance at the National Gallery will be on the 22nd April for International Earth Day. Alongside Love Ssega, the performance will feature the talents of acclaimed poets Solomon O.B. and Kieron Rennie, dance artists Krystal S. Lowe and Paris Crossley. The music composed by Love Ssega for the performance will be inspired by the National Gallery's world-class collection and the views of 18-35 year old Londoners from diverse backgrounds previously recorded at the workshop in National Gallery X Lab. The workshop and performance will feed into the creation of an artistic film that will be premiered in June 2022 and free to access for all.

This project is supported by the National Gallery X (National Gallery and King's College) and Nesta. For more information please visit: lovessega.com.

Photo Credits: Andrew Kiwanuka & Ben Millar Cole

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