Everything for Everyone and Nothing for Us

New work as part of the group show MIRRORCITY at the Hayward Gallery.

Everything for Everyone and Nothing for Us shows with an existing work: Hold your Ground. Shown side by side, these two films are both about languages of protest, and the relationship of the body to protest. Everything for Everyone and Nothing for Us is set in a TV studio, where a protester-in-training listens to audio extracts from a political speech by Margaret Thatcher. Having absorbed the sounds, the protester uses movement to exorcise Thatcher’s voice, retraining the body to resist capitalism.

In Hold Your Ground the same protester struggles to turn utterances into speech. Her efforts are interrupted by archive footage of protests in Egypt, Northern Ireland and London. Eventually, she manages to pronounce four phonetic phrases reconstructed from Arabic, meaning ‘hold your ground’, ‘Egyptians’, ‘homeland’ (of the earth, of the Nile) and ‘strike’.

The title of Hold Your Ground is taken from the pamphlet ‘How To Protest Intelligently’. Everything for Everyone and Nothing for Us echoes the slogan of the Mexican Zapatista liberation movement, which began its struggle against neoliberalism, exploitation and racist oppression in 1994.

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