Drafts (2025)

Watch the Drafts film with AD Voiceover

Drafts (2025)

[soft liquid keys chime nostalgically] at the beginning of the film, setting a textured tone of liquidity, reflection and softness. Following the director’s rough cut and a conversation about the sound of language with Foster, Axel Kacoutié, an award-winning audio artist andpoet, produced a responsive score based on their intuition and gut knowledge. Disabled and queer-led working group Carefuffle in London then penned the captions in an eb-and flo collaborative process—communicating the nuance of Kacoutié’s vision. Their creative captioning, throughout the work, responds to musical texture, voice, non-verbal communication, and visuality. It incorporates animations, symbols, directional changes, as well as variations in typeface, colour and rhythm. This approach builds from the methodological bedrock developed for Drafts by Collective Text, a Glasgow-based, Disabled and Deaf artist-led organisation.

Following a young Black masc in rural England, we come across new growth amongst browned leaves as we spiritually enter Spring. Just as language attempts to resist capture through its opacity, so does the boi, whose future is ahead of him if only the sector would allow it. You know, if the industry doesn’t try to split him—forcing apart melanin and disability—like trying to separate leaves from soil.

Split.
Splinting between experience and articulation.

Hands call to us; call out and reground us. The hands of the teenager, Muslim, British South Asian, Deaf actor Sahera Khan, and Black Deaf actor David Ellington remind us to show up for the living and the future. Their hands are followed by those of Heather Peak (DASH), reciting their ‘draft’ as a synesthetic drawing to declare, embody, and deposit their intentions for Future Curators Programme (FCP) and how they are feeling their way through the process. Peak is proceeded by ‘drafts’ from Claudia Lastra (Arts Catalyst), Elinor Morgan (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, MIMA), Roma Piotrowska (Midlands Arts Centre), Trish Wheatley (Disability Arts Online), James Green (Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange), and Rosie Cooper (Wysing Arts Centre).

In the face of prevailing austerity, we are proud to recommit ourselves to leading change. Launched in August 2025 via a simultaneous digital release across eight partner organisations, including DASH, Drafts brings together the individual and organisational voices of directors and curators from seven influential contemporary visual arts organisations across England to create a constellation of vision and mission statements for the Future Curators Programme (FCP).

Download the Drafts BSL Transcript

Download the Press Release

If possible, listen to the film through headphones.

Drafts, 2025, dir. Jade Foster, (film still – single channel video). Cinematographer Freddy Griffiths, ©Jade Foster. Courtesy the artist, DASH, and Future Curators Programme partners.

Credits

Director: Jade Foster
Cinematographer: Freddy Griffiths
Film Composer: Axel Kacoutié
Cast: Joshua Samuel, Sahera Khan and David Ellington; Heather Peak, Claudia Lastra, Elinor Morgan, Roma Piotrowska, Trish Wheatley, James Green, and Rosie Cooper
Caption Groundwork: Collective Text
Captioning Consultant (Collective Text): Bea Webster
Creative Captioning: Carefuffle
Captioning Consultant (Carefuffle): Nina Thomas
Audio Description: SoundScribe and Jade Foster
SoundScribe Visual Awareness Consultant: Kirin Saeed
Production Assistant: Lucy Mounfield
DASH Team (Production Support): Esther Cartwright and Rachel Fleming-Mulford
Location: Wysing Arts Centre

About the Director

Jade Foster (they/them) is a British curatorial and business consultant, artist and art historian of Afro-Caribbean heritage living in Yarm, North Yorkshire. They are currently a Curator at Primary in Nottingham and was a Curator at DASH. At DASH, they curated their system change work, including The DASH Library and the Future Curators Programme (FCP)—a consortium and residency programme for Disabled curators within seven visual arts institutions across the UK. Recently, they made their directorial debut with Drafts (2025). Previously, Foster has worked with artist filmmakers such as Sonya Dyer, Maybelle Peters, Jala Wahid, and Matthew Arthur Williams. And has an interest in Latin American and Caribbean-descended modern and contemporary art, writing about the film practices of Carolyn Lazard, Lygia Pape, Anna Maria Maiolino, and, in recent years, Alberta Whittle for LUX.

Find out more about the Future Curators Programm.