"Errant, Curious,Relational".
This is how Ishy Pryce-Parchment, a London-based writer, researcher, and cultural worker, describes his creative practice. His practice refuses to settle and conform, it follows curiosity down several paths at once, moving fluidly between text, moving image, and curation. To spend time with his work is to be invited into a kind of thinking that poet Dionne Brand once described as "sitting in the room with history": patient, unresolved, and always on the move.
While “Black Studies” is often associated with formal academic settings, Ishy’s approach is described as;
“collective embodied experiments in intellectual labour and social life”.
He resists settling into a single medium or method, moving between text, research, and moving image. Each form is seen as open to being expanded, interrupted, and engaged with others. Photography, installation, performance, readings, and more experimental combinations have all been incorporated into his work, which seems less concerned with defining boundaries than exploring what happens when they become permeable. Central to Ishy’s practice is an unfaltering engagement with the legacies of transatlantic slavery and Black diasporic histories, alongside questions of collectivity and resistance. Rather than viewing research as a final answer, he uses it to initiate change. Moving image, in particular, has become a tool for loosening research language, making ideas more sensory, ambiguous, and affective. This allows for knowledge forms beyond academic constraints.
This sense of movement extends to his curatorial and programming work. Through film programming, public events, and gatherings, he aims to create conditions for collective attention. These spaces encourage pause, reflection, annotation, lingering, and simply thinking together. At the core of his curatorial work is generating curiosity and connections:
“I am thinking about how to generate questions and curiosity, and how to make connections that emerge not only from my lived positionality – how I read, move through, and am situated within the world – but also through a contaminative process of reading deeply and working waywardly across genres and forms.”
There is a deliberate openness to these encounters, an attempt to allow imaginative rupture without prescribing its form. Across various strands of his work, there is a shared commitment to keeping thought in motion. A close friend once described Ishy’s practice as;
“a kind of thinking that’s always on the move”.
This is appropriate not because the work constantly seeks a conclusion, but because it resists the notion of one. Ishy’s intellectual lineage can be traced to scholars such as Christina Sharpe, Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten, Katherine McKittrick, Frantz Fanon, who all influenced his understanding of our racially defined existence.
“I am inspired by Black artistic, intellectual, and social traditions that understand creativity as a way of giving new language to know the world as it is and might become.”
That relationship between creativity, research, and collective thinking came into sharper focus when Ishy was invited to develop a Black Study seminar and programme at Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. The opportunity allowed him to delve deeper into his research and test his ideas alongside fellow researchers, writers, and artists.
“Developing these ideas further through a seminar directorship with the Museo Reina Sofía profoundly shifted my frames of reference for what collective and collaborative research and practice might look like.”
That sense of collaboration continues to inform his practice, particularly as he develops his work with moving image. For Ishy, film offers a way of thinking through ideas that don’t always translate easily into academic or written forms, allowing research to become more sensory, ambiguous, and affective.
His practice continues to move between these different forms and modes of thinking. If Black Study provides one framework for the work, moving image offers another way of putting those ideas into motion, a way of following the questions rather than resolving them. His throughline, then, isn't a single medium but a way of thinking: treating everyday life, memory, and collective attention as forms of intellectual work in their own right.
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