Sunday 6 September 2026, 7.30pm
With voice, text and fire: Phoenix Yemi and Zara Joan Miller will perform a new work to celebrate the launch of Miller’s poetry book Year of the Dragon published by TACO! Thea Sands will respond to the text through food: prepared, performed, swallowed. Anastasia Freygang will play a solo set and Mo Dafa will play music over the night.
To reserve food with your ticket please email thea@cafeoto.pro (food not included in the ticket price)
Year of the Dragon (TACO!, 2026)
someone is driving between two fields
someone else is feeding the baby
you're at the buffet
24 hour buffet
all you can eat meat
that is me
Written in the Year of the Dragon, Zara Joan Miller's long poem traces fire across a year. Moving through the experience of becoming a mother, it repurposes rage and tenderness as forces of transformation. A radical re-centering that calls into question wider meanings of home, security, faith and survival in the face of global imperialism. A year of feeding fire, of dousing and soft loving.
Food tokens can be collected and paid for by card on the door -
Sample Vegan Menu: £12.5
YEAR OF THE DRAGON FOOD
Courgette & Potato Pakora w. pear, tamarind & mint chutney (gf, ve)
Saag Tofu w. sticky garlic aubergine, pickled chilli (gf, ve)
Carrot, Saffron & Ginger cake (ve) (CONTAINS NUTS)
SPECIAL DRINKS
Black Cardamom, Mint & Juniper Tonic - £3.5
Make it boozy add tequila, whisky etc - £6.5
Warm Smoky Almond Chai
Locally sourced organic produce from Growing Communities
Pakora & Saag Allergens: mustard, sulphites, soy
Cake Allergens: NUTS, gluten, sulphites
May contain traces of all major allergens due to the size of our kitchen
Zara Joan Miller is a British/Iranian artist working across poetry, performance and film. Her writing often situates itself in communal time(keeping) and space before taking root in the private body. BLUE MONDAY was published by JOAN Publishing in 2022 and her second book of poetry Year of the Dragon is forthcoming with TACO! Recent solo performances draw from ongoing research into abjection, lactation and personal ancestry. Her work has recently been presented at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Barbican Centre, Maximilian William Gallery, Les Atelier Claus, Horse Hospital, In Vitro, Default Den Haag and has appeared in motor dance journal, Fieldnotes journal, Hotel, Another Gaze and Worms Magazine. Blue Monday was also released as a duo LP with Ute Kanngießer on New York label Reading Group in 2023.
Phoenix Yemi is a Nigerian-British poet, artist, and curator whose work is dedicated to resistance through the erotic. Rooted in surrealist traditions of liberation, she works at the intersections of body and earth, desire and dissent, reimagining language to summon new ways of being. Her writing moves between the intimate and the mythic, drawing on dream logic, ritual, and Black feminist thought to examine transformation, longing, and resistance. She has performed across London in spaces including Tate Modern, the Barbican, and the Serpentine. She writes A Worm Moon for Worms Magazine, and is the founder of Black Geographies.
Thea is a cook, artist and gardener from Paisley. She combines the three in a practice that seeks to feed back into the earth through careful cyclic use of materials found across the kitchen and garden. She runs a low waste, organic kitchen at Cafe OTO, devising affordable, seasonal, nourishing menus using produce she grows at Growing Communities’ urban farms; and uses food/plant scraps to make natural dyes, ink, photographic developers and print emulsions. She studied music at Clare College Cambridge and collects field recordings which inform her own improvisations on tape and occasional performances. She is drawn to visceral imperfect bodily forms, marled, messy, muddy textures, early music, bells, overtones, drones, domestic and folkloric rituals and the dark theatricality of sacred spaces which seep into her photography, drawings, video and sound works. She is interested in collaging together the ingredients, materials, tools, sights and sounds experienced across her intensely physical and sensory work as a cook and gardener into a strange, deformed and surreal light that feeds her reality.
She writes recipes for Infant Tree’s regular newsletter and keeps a personal website of images and writing.
https://theasands.wixsite.com/photography
Mo Dafa is Senior Producer and Programmer at Cafe OTO.
Anastasia Freygang’s shouty, aria-like compositions act as vocal ciphers.
She tours improvising as suny tobt fum and is 1/3 of LISA.
