︎ YEAR OF THE DRAGON ︎ ZARA JOAN MILLER
︎ YEAR OF THE DRAGON ︎ ZARA JOAN MILLER
ZARA JOAN MILLER
YEAR OF THE DRAGON
£12
LAUNCH: 6 SEPT 2026
7:30 Pm
CAFE OTO
18–22 Ashwin Street
E8 3DL
Launch event page and tickets
£10 advance / £12 on the door / Free for Cafe OTO members
someone is driving between two fields
someone else is feeding the baby
you’re at the buffet
24 hour buffet
all you can eat meat
that is me
Written in the Year of the Dragon, Zara Joan Miller’s long poem traces fire across a year. Moving through the experience of becoming a mother, it repurposes rage and tenderness as forces of transformation. A radical re-centering that calls into question wider meanings of home, security, faith and survival in the face of global imperialism. A year of feeding fire, of dousing and soft loving.
TACO! invites you to the book launch of Year of the Dragon by Zara Joan Miller at Cafe OTO. With voice, text and fire: Theodora Laird, Phoenix Yemi and Zara Joan Miller will perform a new work to celebrate the launch of Year of the Dragon. Thea Sands will respond to the text through food: prepared, performed, swallowed. Anastasia Freygang will play a solo set and Mo Dafa will play music over the night. More information about the event and tickets can be found here.
Year of the Dragon was initially written as part of a radio co-commission between TACO! and Radiophrenia for blurt, an evening of sonic experiments in text. First performed and broadcast in 2024, it has since been presented at Radioprenia (Glasgow), in duo with cellist Ute Kanngieẞer at Cafe OTO (London) and at Les Atelier Claus (Brussels). Zara Joan Miller has added to the original script and TACO! is pleased to publish it in September 2026.
someone else is feeding the baby
you’re at the buffet
24 hour buffet
all you can eat meat
that is me
Written in the Year of the Dragon, Zara Joan Miller’s long poem traces fire across a year. Moving through the experience of becoming a mother, it repurposes rage and tenderness as forces of transformation. A radical re-centering that calls into question wider meanings of home, security, faith and survival in the face of global imperialism. A year of feeding fire, of dousing and soft loving.
§
TACO! invites you to the book launch of Year of the Dragon by Zara Joan Miller at Cafe OTO. With voice, text and fire: Theodora Laird, Phoenix Yemi and Zara Joan Miller will perform a new work to celebrate the launch of Year of the Dragon. Thea Sands will respond to the text through food: prepared, performed, swallowed. Anastasia Freygang will play a solo set and Mo Dafa will play music over the night. More information about the event and tickets can be found here.
§
Year of the Dragon was initially written as part of a radio co-commission between TACO! and Radiophrenia for blurt, an evening of sonic experiments in text. First performed and broadcast in 2024, it has since been presented at Radioprenia (Glasgow), in duo with cellist Ute Kanngieẞer at Cafe OTO (London) and at Les Atelier Claus (Brussels). Zara Joan Miller has added to the original script and TACO! is pleased to publish it in September 2026.
Zara Joan Miller is a British/Iranian artist working across poetry, performance and film. Her writing often situates itself in communal time(keeping) and space before taking root in the private body. BLUE MONDAY was published by JOAN Publishing in 2022 and her second book of poetry Year of the Dragon is forthcoming with TACO. She has performed or screened work recently at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Barbican Centre, Maximilian William Gallery, Les Atelier Claus, In Vitro, Default Den Haag. Her writing has appeared in motor dance journal, Fieldnotes journal, Hotel, Another Gaze and Worms. Blue Monday was also released as a duo LP with Ute Kanngießer on New York label Reading Group in 2023. zarajoanmiller.com
Theodora Laird is a vocalist and multidisciplinary artist. Releases under her solo project ‘feeo’ have received critical acclaim. Theodora's practice has involved in tandem with an interest in situating narratives within freely improvised music, specifically through frequent involvement in the GRAIN residency.
Phoenix Yemi is a Nigerian-British poet, artist, and curator whose work is dedicated to resistance through the erotic. Rooted in surrealist traditions of liberation, she works at the intersections of body and earth, desire and dissent, reimagining language to summon new ways of being. Her writing moves between the intimate and the mythic, drawing on dream logic, ritual, and Black feminist thought to examine transformation, longing, and resistance. She has performed across London in spaces including Tate Modern, the Barbican, and the Serpentine. She writes A Worm Moon for Worms Magazine, and is the founder of Black Geographies.
Anastasia Freygang’s shouty, aria-like compositions act as vocal ciphers. She tours improvising as suny tobt fum and is 1/3 of LISA. 69pleasuredome69.bandcamp.com
anastasia-freygang.com
Mo Dafa is Senior Producer and Programmer at Cafe OTO.
Thea Jeffery Sands is a cook, artist and gardener from Paisley. She combines the three in a practice that seeks to feed back into the earth through careful cyclic use of materials found across the kitchen and garden. She runs a low waste, organic kitchen at Cafe Oto, devising affordable, seasonal, nourishing menus using produce she grows at Growing Communities’ urban farms; and uses food/plant scraps to make natural dyes, ink, photographic developers and print emulsions. She studied music at Clare College Cambridge and collects field recordings which inform her own improvisations on tape and occasional performances. She is drawn to visceral imperfect bodily forms, marled, messy, muddy textures, early music, bells, overtones, drones, domestic and folkloric rituals and the dark theatricality of sacred spaces which seep into her photography, drawings, video and sound works. She is interested in collaging together the ingredients, materials, tools, sights and sounds experienced across her intensely physical and sensory work as a cook and gardener into a strange, deformed and surreal light that feeds her reality. She writes recipes for Infant Tree’s regular newsletter and keeps a personal website of images and writing. theasands.wixsite.com/photography
Phoenix Yemi is a Nigerian-British poet, artist, and curator whose work is dedicated to resistance through the erotic. Rooted in surrealist traditions of liberation, she works at the intersections of body and earth, desire and dissent, reimagining language to summon new ways of being. Her writing moves between the intimate and the mythic, drawing on dream logic, ritual, and Black feminist thought to examine transformation, longing, and resistance. She has performed across London in spaces including Tate Modern, the Barbican, and the Serpentine. She writes A Worm Moon for Worms Magazine, and is the founder of Black Geographies.
Anastasia Freygang’s shouty, aria-like compositions act as vocal ciphers. She tours improvising as suny tobt fum and is 1/3 of LISA. 69pleasuredome69.bandcamp.com
anastasia-freygang.com
Mo Dafa is Senior Producer and Programmer at Cafe OTO.
Thea Jeffery Sands is a cook, artist and gardener from Paisley. She combines the three in a practice that seeks to feed back into the earth through careful cyclic use of materials found across the kitchen and garden. She runs a low waste, organic kitchen at Cafe Oto, devising affordable, seasonal, nourishing menus using produce she grows at Growing Communities’ urban farms; and uses food/plant scraps to make natural dyes, ink, photographic developers and print emulsions. She studied music at Clare College Cambridge and collects field recordings which inform her own improvisations on tape and occasional performances. She is drawn to visceral imperfect bodily forms, marled, messy, muddy textures, early music, bells, overtones, drones, domestic and folkloric rituals and the dark theatricality of sacred spaces which seep into her photography, drawings, video and sound works. She is interested in collaging together the ingredients, materials, tools, sights and sounds experienced across her intensely physical and sensory work as a cook and gardener into a strange, deformed and surreal light that feeds her reality. She writes recipes for Infant Tree’s regular newsletter and keeps a personal website of images and writing. theasands.wixsite.com/photography