Lakeside Centre Performance Evening
Friday 18th September 2026 , 6:00pm to 9:00pm
Join us at the Lakeside Centre for a dynamic and collaborative evening of performance. Led by artist Joanna Penso, and featuring work by multidisciplinary artist Gusty Ferro, explore performance through an undiscovered lens.
To Be Rendered
To Be Rendered is a collaborative piece performed by artist Joanna Penso and glitch musician Alessandro La Barbera.
Sounds of the body in movement are amplified using stethoscope microphones, presenting intimate body noises as art material.
From the mixing desk, La Barbera assumes control over the sounds produced by Penso’s movements, progressively warping and processing them until they bear little resemblance to their original source. Through the use of loopers, he layers these transformed sounds into pulsating rhythmic patterns.
Expansive breaths trigger recordings collected underwater in the Mediterranean Sea, resting heart beats transform into sounds from outer space. The female performer is treated as a vessel for a voice that is not her own.
Observed both visually and acoustically with microphones strapped to her body, Penso’s performance fluctuates between concious and unconcious movement.
Exploring power dynamics between the male and female, the performers tussle for control over the audio output, raising the question ‘whose voice gets to be heard?’
TRANSMEAD listening event and live act by Gusty Ferro
Multidisciplinary artist Gusty Ferro brings a deeply exploratory approach to sound through TRANSMEAD, a monthly programme at RTM.FM that presents a carefully curated selection of experimental and genre-defying music from artists working today.
Each episode combines newly discovered sonic experiments with selections from Gusty’s extensive personal archive of vinyl records, cassette tapes and digital collections. The result is a constantly evolving journey through contemporary underground music, where unexpected textures and bold artistic voices coexist. TRANSMEAD embodies a spirit of discovery, offering listeners a window into adventurous sounds that challenge traditional genre boundaries.
TRANSMEAD Live Act
Gusty Ferro is improvising live with modular synthesisers, sampling field recordings- including material from their recent residency in Latvia; and using contact mic to generate a shapeshifting noise soundscape. Creating abstract narratives through sound, Gusty revisits memories of lived experiences and invites listeners to inhabit a fictional space where identities transform and perceptions merge into a new place.
Gusty says (in quote from text produced for the exhibition WITHIN at Dom Gallery, in Riga, July 2026):
“I have been thinking about this fictional place called TRANSMEAD, that is also the name of my radio programme on experimental music at rtm.fm. I live in an estate in South East London that is going through a phase of redevelopment and partial demolition. The whole environment surrounding where I stay has been shaping my lived experience in the city and one of the materials that I am interested in this context is the perforated metal used to ‘cage’ empty properties. I started to experiment with this metal mesh in relation to light and the shift in perception that happens depending on the spatial conditions created. It also changes the behaviour of sound in space and the contact microphones attached to it captures resonance and generates feedback loops – that is something I explore in my live performances where I improvise with modular synthesisers, sampling field recordings, patching modulations and delay effects to create temporal distortions and granular synthesis.”
About Joanna Penso
Joanna Penso is a Yorkshire artist based in London. Her work centres sounds of the body and gut listening as a vehicle to understanding oneself, one another and the environment around us. Her research paper: The Body as Site was delivered at the Centre for Research into Sound Art Practice in 2024 and forms the basis of her on-going practice-based research. In 2024 she was awarded a DYCP grant to expand her practice into live performance. From this experimentation and upskilling period evolved a solo live performance using body amplification; Body Talks, which was shown at Divfuse Projects and The Nunnery Gallery, 2025. Her crowd-funded film Digestion Symphony, depicting performative eating to the beat of an ever-quickening metronome was shown at Aesthetica Art Prize in 2023. Penso currently has a regular radio programme on Resonance.FM: Come Digest With Me, featuring international artists, curators, chefs, historians and doctors. She has delivered workshops for Dorich House Museum and has exhibited at Pushkin House, York Art Gallery, APT Gallery, Southwark Park Galleries and at St Ives September Fest.
About Alessandro La Barbera
Alessandro La Barbera is a musician and producer from Palermo, Sicily, adopted by London in 2010. His work blends triphop, electro-acoustic beats, glitch music and sampling. He is a founder of artist collective HolyShift; a regular music event in London and Berlin giving artists the chance to try out new music in front of live audiences. La Barbera has been teaching music and music production in schools and charities for over a decade, also delivering workshops for neurodivergent people at the award-winning charity Lewisham Music. He works independently in music production and mixing engineering at Studio 18 in South Bermondsey having contributed towards the work of Sans Sousis, Davide Shorty, TJoe Cheung, Natalie Oliveri, Maria Chiara Argiro, Apathy Khea and Jamie Leeming.
Transport Information
Tube Station: Abbey Wood (National Rail, Elizabeth Line).
Bus: 117, 229, 401, 472, 601, 301, 602, 669, N1
Please note parking is not available. There is a bike shed on site.
Access Information
The Lakeside Centre has step-free access throughout from street level, with access via the lifts to upper floor studios and the exhibition space. Accessible toilets are available on the ground floor and first floor, with baby change facilities available via Thamesmead Social cafe. This venue does not have a hearing loop system.
For full access information and queries, please email pandp@bowarts.com.