Hold Hold Fire, 2019

video installation, ‘Though it's dark, still I sing’: 34th Bienal de São Paulo, 2021, curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, Paulo Miyada, Carla Zaccagnini, Francesco Stocchi, Ruth Estévez

The camera follows the actions of a group of contemporary women as they engage in a self-defence workshop. The video dwells on the bodily and collective tactics women can learn to resist everyday violence as well as police aggression, and how they can take ownership of the situation. The two-channel film, focuses on some of the sophisticated techniques of self-defence, care, and collaborative methods of feminist pedagogy that have been developed and practiced by feminist groups, especially in women’s spaces and activist organisations. We see the women engage in a learning process in which they struggle to overcome the taboos surrounding female aggression and anger. As they rehearse movements and practise Jiu-Jitsu throws, the participants build up to a recreation of an archival photograph of The People’s Army – a self-defence group that was part of the East London Federation of the Suffragettes (ELFS) – posing with guns in Victoria Park, London, around 1914. The video’s ultimate image is something like a tableaux vivant, or a moving history painting, which takes place in front of a painted theatrical backdrop of the park.

Today the history of the suffragette movement is celebrated in the UK, but what is often left out is that in their time they were considered to be terrorists by the British state.

Women will never win...until we have an army...marching with sticks and stones from the East End of London and other parts, to make themselves terrible to the Government – an army strong enough to imprison the Cabinet Ministers in their official residencies or in Parliament... Our People’s Army is ready now, and all of you are armed.

—Sylvia Pankhurst, quote from Liberty of Death, c. 1913

There’s something about how we set boundaries as women that we often don’t do until this point. I’m allowed to set a boundary to someone before they come anywhere near me… There is a certain level of agency that we don’t allow ourselves.

—Jennifer Jackson

In exchange for taking part in the film, participants received a whole day of self-defence training with movement director Jennifer Jackson. We provided lunch and a crèche with free childcare, so that those with children could attend. Other historical sources referred to in the video included Women Against Pit Closures, who played an important role in the British miners’ strike of 1984–85, and Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, an anti-nuclear protest from 1981–2000, which several of the women present had participated in.

The pencil drawings which accompany the video installation in the Bienal de São Paulo, are based on early twentieth century press photographs of suffragettes being apprehended by the police. These women are shown in all their individuality, whereas the identities of the men are masked by their uniforms, and the actions they perform are indistinguishable from those of the police officers who violently break up protests today. This is an experience shared by many in the contemporary activist groups that I spoke with during my research for this project, underlining the violence with which those in power continue to respond to struggles for equal rights.

The video was originally commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, and is a companion piece to the project ‘Neither Strivers Nor Skivers, They Will Not Define Us’.