Dre Spisto 
Urchins, Mouths, 2026. 

Moving image, found objects, personal objects, ceramic urchins, hag stones, bay leaves, sea creatures, mirrors, metallic clothes pegs, sheets, sand, radio receiver, small table, cushions, handwritten text, self-portrait photography, tidal times book,light, drawing, notes, soundscape, gifts.

Urchins, Mouths is an installation and moving image work that visitors enter and inhabit at their own pace. The space contains an open altar of personal objects, hag stones, bay leaves, self-portraits, fragments, sheets from ex-lovers and close friends alongside a seating area, sand, chalk drawings, and handwritten text. A film plays on loop: an autofiction assembled from fragments of encounters with colleagues, friends, strangers and family.

The work draws on a queer vocabulary of attachment, treating the domestic as devotion and objects as beings with their own agency and memory. Influenced by Édouard Glissant’s ethics of opacity, Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia, the self as unresolved fragments and the animist logic of folk and spiritual practice.

The piece continues Dré’s ongoing enquiry into peripheral presence, non-normative intimacy, and the body as site of both tenderness and defence. It connects to their Venezuelan roots the urchin as a figure of spiky softness, hard to touch, flesh underneath and to wider questions of displacement, occupation, and what it means to have built the power to make a home in what you touch.

Dre Spisto is an artist whose work moves across live performance, experimental film, and installation. Rooted in sensory knowledge and subversive tenderness, their practice explores the entangled terrains of queerness, displacement and desire, often through surreal, non-linear compositions that invite audiences into states of not-knowing, participation and mischief-seeking.

Working across theatres, galleries, and club spaces, Dre draws on the energies of each to shape forms of encounter that are affective, participatory, and resistant to traditional spectatorship. Their works blur the edges of the absurd and the intimate, using humour not as distraction but as a disarming technology for closeness, a way to hold contradiction and rupture tightness.

A graduate of Arthaus Berlin in Lecoq and embodied practices, with a specialism in clown through mask, Dre has created recent works including 50 Ways to Kill a Slug, But Soft!, and The Stimming Pool. Their work has been presented at Battersea Arts Centre, Soho Theatre, BFI, ICA, CASA Festival, and The British Museum.