Speculative Intimacies: The Worlds of Yarli Allison & Letizia Miro

This screening highlights the moving image works of Canadian-born Hong Kong artist Yarli Allison, centering their long-standing collaboration with writer and activist Letizia Miro.

At the heart of these works is a commitment to speculative world-building as a method for imagining radical futures. From bioengineered cities born from embryonic stem cells to demimonde ecologies shaped by desire and resistance, these projects channel science fiction and personal archive to address the precarity and possibilities of embodied life. These are not utopias of escape, but intimate, insurgent visions—where repair, rebellion, and relationality take centre stage, and where the intersections of gender, intimacy, labour, and care are sensitively probed.

The screening is followed by a conversation between Yarli Allison and Letizia Miro on technology, speculative storytelling, and queer feminist futurities.

Cell Whisperers Dir. Yarli Allison | UK | 2025 | 8min excerpt

In the year 2135, visitors arrive at a stem cell clinic. Among them, an 80-year-old pregnant granny seeks guidance amid shifting definitions of family, intimacy, and genetic legacy. What does it mean to repair across generations? To hold reproductive agency while carrying inherited grief? A poetic study of what makes us human, how bodies remember, and why we might (not) choose to rewrite them.

Datafication〈Act 1〉: May Ian Valley 0101 Dir. Yarli Allison | UK | 2021 | 5min

Datafication Act 1 : May Ian Valley 0101 is part of Yarli’s mixed-media series in exploring themes of digital humanity. In the looping dreamscape of 'Act 1', Yarli imagines daily influences of AI emergence and gamification on one's behaviour - taking the most intimate sexual encounters as departure.

This Is Not For Clients Dir. Letizia Miro, Yarli Allison | UK | 2023 | 11min

This dual-channel video work emerges from Miro’s decade of experience as a sex worker, poet, and activist. Her self-fictional narration explores shifting subjectivities and the psychic layers of transactional intimacy. These dialogues are translated into a dense visual language that blur the boundaries between the intimate and the transactional, the personal and the performative.

The Utopia Project (World Premiere) Dir. Letizia Miro | UK | 2025 | 12min

Blending poetic storytelling, embodied imagery, and gendered performance, the film explores dissociation, desire, resistance, and radical intimacy. In a world entangled in the exhausting emotional and productive demands of capitalism, the film envisions futures where connection, softness, and sensuality become acts of rebellion and survival.

Artist bios:

Letizia Miro is a London and Barcelona-based artist and writer exploring themes of desire, embodiment, power, and dissident sexualities through video, writing, and visual arts. Her work navigates the intersection of dissident sexualities and existential conditions, addressing intimacy, autonomy, and the material conditions of erotic capital. Featured in exhibitions at the V&A, ICA London, and Gallery 35m2 in Prague, and published in Propel Magazine, Glanta, and Kritiker, she creates provocative, politically charged narratives. Letizia is a Doctor in Philosophy from the University of London and has received training from the Poetry School in London. She is currently finishing her first poetry chapbook, “Peripheral Corporalities”, written in Spanish under the mentorship of the poet Alicia García Núñez.

Yarli Allison (she/they) is a Canadian-born, Hong Kongese artist based in London, UK, working across sculpture, installation, CGI (VR/AR/3D/game), moving images, drawing, poetry, tattooing, and performance.

Yarli earned an MFA with first-class honours in Sculpture from The Slade School of Fine Art. Their work has been exhibited at Tai Kwun Contemporary (HK), FACT (Liverpool), Barbican Centre, ICA, and V&A Museum (London).

Drawing from experiences of displacement, Yarli’s ‘what-if’ scenarios serve as playgrounds for exploring human and object existence in utopian or dystopian systems—amid mythological creatures, absurd survival, or futile coping mechanisms for collective grief.