Dr Anthea Moys (she/her) is a South African/UK-based artist and practice researcher whose work explores the intersections of play, power, and decoloniality, and a 2026 British Council 90th Anniversary Research Fellow. With a cross-disciplinary practice spanning two decades, her approach blends arts, play-oriented studies, performance, co-production, and peer-to-peer learning. As a practitioner, her work invites people to reimagine the "rules of the game” and binaries like winning/losing and entertain new, often unwinnable, games that encourage complexity through play. After 15 years as an artist and wanting to sharpen her practice, she completed a practice research PhD at Northumbria University (2022), developing a reflexive decolonial methodology for play and performance studies.
In a fragmented world where truth is slippery, rebuilding trust may not mean agreeing on facts, but committing to stay in conversation—especially when it’s difficult. During my time at IASH, I’ve explored how the playing of unwinnable games might serve as a practice-research method for trust-building in communities shaped by histories of militarisation, colonialism, and systemic inequality, in both Scotland and South Africa. Rather than offering certainty, these games invite us to flex trust as a muscle—an ongoing, relational practice. What tools might we carry in our trust kits—our carrier bags—to help us gather, listen, and re-story together?
Grounded in a reflexive decolonial feminist approach, this project adopts the trickster as methodological guide—a shapeshifter, boundary-dweller, and conduit between worlds. The trickster resists certainty, mastery, and linear progress, unsettling dominant logics—particularly those shaped by neoliberal frameworks that prioritise productivity, individualism, and commodified ‘happy’ outcomes. In contrast, this work values plural, emergent ways of knowing—cultivating trust, discomfort, and curiosity over closure.
Inspired by the trickster and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1988), two interconnected streams of inquiry have taken shape. The first centres on The Carrier Bag of Tricks workshop, where ten artists and academics explored playful, embodied, unwinnable games as a way to examine how trust grows in real time. Insights from this process will inform a flexible, evolving ‘trust toolkit’ to be expanded in South Africa and beyond.
The second stream is the early development of a four-day public festival to sit alongside the Edinburgh Military Tattoo—a kind of Tattoo Fringe. This festival-in-the-making will offer a critical space for dialogue, performance, and community co-creation that re-stories dominant narratives.
The next phase deepens collaboration with the Keiskamma Art Project and SHADE in the Eastern Cape. If you'd like to be involved, please reach out!
Image: Ode To Glaswegian Tricksters. Photo by Dr Anthony Schrag.