Performing Processions: Premonitions and palimpsests

Abstract

Aligning historic modes of public performance and participation with anthropological theory that questions the hegemony of Western linear notions of time, this article considers processional performance as a way of looking forwards and back simultaneously through analysis of two case studies of work. Blast Theory's Spit Spreads Death: The Parade (2019), a performance procession including interactive light and sound, took place on the streets of Philadelphia acting as a memorial and celebration of the 20,000 lives that were lost in the city during the Spanish flu epidemic 101 years ago to the day on the 28 September after the Liberty Loan Parade. Six months later, the most deadly virus in living memory, the COVID-19 pandemic, spread around the world and Blast Theory's performance procession seemed to be not only a memorial of the lives lost in the previous epidemic, but a premonition of what was to come.

Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke's installation The Procession (2022) snaked around the marble columns of the Duveen gallery at Tate Britain London. Described by Laura Cumming as a procession of the ‘never-ending theatre of humanity’ (2022), this installation of over 150 figures leading towards a pavilion adorned with images of colonial buildings in Guyana both encapsulates and performs a palimpsest of stories of slavery, migration and the movement of people. Rebecca Schneider suggests that it is in the future that our pasts await us: our responses, revisions, or refusals (2018). Analysing these two examples of artworks of premonition and palimpsest, this article argues that processional performance can disrupt linear temporal narratives and memorialize in a way that expands and complicates narratives of sadness, remembering and grief.

I make work which … there is a lot of difficulty in it, maybe defiance, maybe conflict, but it is about hope. You know, it is essential. We can’t survive without it, we drown without it. And what is happening in the Duveen Hall is not a negative movement of people, it is a positive movement of people, they are moving into another life, you know? They may be coming from difficult times, they may be heading through difficult times, but there is an energy there which is about hope, the future, let’s make something positive, you know? Hew Locke (2022b)

INTRODUCTION

Processional performance has historically been significant within many cultures as a public way of celebrating or mourning collectively on the city streets through carnival parades, funeral processions and political marches. Aligning historic modes of public performance and participation with anthropological theory that questions the hegemony of Western linear notions of time, this article considers processional performance as a way of looking forwards and back simultaneously through analysis of two case studies of work. UK-based interactive artists Blast Theory’s SPIT SPREADS DEATH: THE PARADE (SSD:TP) (2019), a reenactment of a procession 101 years prior where participants walked the streets of Philadelphia in the United States to commemorate the lives of those lost in the Spanish flu epidemic, is situated alongside Guyanese-British sculptor Hew Locke’s The Procession (2022), an installation in the Duveen Hall at Tate Britain, London, experienced by walking alongside more than 150 life-sized figures carrying with them the legacies of colonial Guyana. This article considers processions as both palimpsest (acknowledging the historical moments that precede them, events that have caused grief within the communities affected) and premonition (the enactment of the procession as something that will recur in the future in a different contextual moment). It attempts to understand how non-linear time can entangle ideas of sadness and hope, acknowledging them as ‘co-related’ (Thomas 2016: 194).

I experienced The Procession live in 2022 and worked from film documentation for SSD:TP (Blast Theory 2019b) alongside interviewing Matt Adams from Blast Theory and watching interviews with Locke. I analyse these works from my subject position as a white, woman performance-researcher based in Scotland who has been exploring performance mobilities for more than a decade. Informed by anthropologist Deborah A. Thomas’s work on Caribbean histories, my readings of these processions attempt to critique universal notions of linear time rooted within Western Christian history and ideas of evolution. Thomas questions the ways in which a Western capitalist system dictates progress and claims that the field of anthropology has

encouraged us instead to pay attention to multiple and co-existing socio-cultural constructions of time, and to the ways representations of time have been instruments of power, not only in relation to colonial (and nationalist) governmentality, but also in terms of anthropological epistemology. (Thomas 2016: 178)

Processional performances can provide spaces where the past and the future can co-relate and be experienced simultaneously, alongside experiences of sadness and hope.

Sara Ahmed claims in The Cultural Politics of Emotion that anger and sadness felt when faced with the pain of another ‘is what allows the reader to enter into a relationship with the other, premised on generosity rather than indifference’ (2014: 21)¹. Ahmed later states: ‘Hope is an investment that the paths we follow will get us somewhere’ (2017: 46–7). With epidemic deaths and colonialism as the contexts for these artworks, can the ‘hopeful’ enacted journeys and ephemeral communities formed through processional performance co-exist alongside the sadness and difficulty of the origin events? Thomas discusses how recurring moments of extreme violence as part of ongoing repeated patterns of structural and symbolic violence, ‘lead to an experience of time neither as linear nor cyclical, but as simultaneous, where the future, past, and present are mutually constitutive and have the potential to be coincidentally influential’ (2016: 177). Her research focuses on a Caribbean context and is complemented by Nadia Jessop’s contention that Afro-Caribbean cultural identities are partly formed through coping with historical and contemporary forms of ‘transience’ (2021: 73). Analysing these two artworks, I argue that processional performance can disrupt linear temporal narratives and memorialize in a way that expands and complicates narratives of sadness, remembering and grief.

PROCESSION

The etymology of procession is from the late Old English, via Old French from Latin processio(n-), from procedure, to ‘move forward’. To take part in a procession is also referred to with the verb to process. This has its own related definition: ‘a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end’. I use ‘procession’ rather than parade, march, protest or carnival, as each of these terms have specific connotations and cultural histories. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Brooks McNamara offer definitions of processional performance in their 1985 study including that of ‘performance in motion through space’ (1985: 2, my emphasis). Solnit writes: ‘a procession is a participant’s journey, while a parade is a performance with audience’ (2001: 215). Who the walking is for, participant or spectator, is particularly relevant when the procession commemorates another absent person or people. Solnit states in Wanderlust:

Parades, demonstrations, protests, uprisings, and urban revolutions are all about members of the public moving through public space for expressive and political rather than merely practical reasons. (2001: 216, my emphasis)

Solnit refines the idea of performance in motion through space to focus on public space. All public spaces are not created equal, and the streets of a city may be accessible to some in a way that a gallery space is not. Alternatively, for wheelchair users, elements of urban design can inhibit mobility through the city. Sites are important, as these places are themselves active and porose elements that are interconnected both spatially and temporally (Donald 2012: 223). In 1918 the streets of Philadelphia were the site of the Liberty Loan Parade – an event to promote government bonds that helped pay for troops in World War I – which has been identified as the probable cause of the increased spread of the flu virus and high death rate in Philadelphia, the worst hit American city with 20,000 people dead. More than 200,000 people cheered walkers for over two miles along Broad Street. The exact route was walked 101 years later by participants of SSD:TP. Broad Street, where these previous parades had taken place, became the site of protests by Black Lives Matters’ activists and supporters two months after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic. The site in each of these processions is consistent (Broad Street, Philadelphia) but the temporal context of the political or cultural moment is in flux.

SPIT SPREADS DEATH: THE PARADE

Blast Theory was founded in 1991 and is led by Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj. Based in Brighton, the company is renowned for its interactive art and innovative application of new media technologies into live performance. In 2018 Blast Theory were the first ever artistsin-residence at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva. Blast Theory created an installation called A Cluster of 17 Cases and worked with the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia (a museum of the history of medicine) to develop SSD:TP to commemorate the devastating impacts of the 1918 Spanish flu (fig. 1)².

Figure 1. Blast Theory, SPIT SPREADS DEATH: THE PARADE (2019). Participants walking, holding signs with the names of Philadelphia residents who died in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic. Photo Tivern Turnbull

SSD:TP (2019) was a large-scale public procession through the streets of the city 101 years to the day of the Liberty Loan Parade. Described by Adams as ‘a work about forgetting’ (2022), SSP:TP was staged as an interactive parade of light and sound to remember the individuals who died and the health workers who put their own lives in danger. Prior to the event, participants selected one person to honour who died on the deadliest day, 12 October 1918, based on name, age, profession or address via a website. Mütter Museum historian of epidemiology Nick Bonneau and his team had accessed every death certificate in Philadelphia from the period, identifying flu deaths and creating a database of 20,000 entries. Participants walked holding the death certificate of the person they had selected and one by one each walker stood alone between two light boxes, creating a corridor of white light as the name of the person was read out (fig. 2).

Figure 2. Blast Theory, SPIT SPREADS DEATH: THE PARADE (2019). A participant stands in the light box. Photo Tivern Turnbull

Composer David Lang created a score called Protect Yourself from Infection sung by Philadelphia Grammy-winning choir The Crossing. Blast Theory had developed software that meant that participants could play the choral work synchronized on their phones as they walked from the south of the city where the flu arrived at the Navy Yard in 1918, then up Broad Street to City Hall. The choir sang: ‘Avoid being sprayed by the nose and throat secretions of others’, ‘Beware those who are coughing and sneezing’, ‘Avoid theatres, moving picture shows and other places of public assembly’, the public health messages uncannily familiar to the COVID-19 guidance that was to be mandated in the months after the performance. Adams claims:

We really set out right from the get-go to make a parade that was about participation more than spectatorship … how do you make a human-scale experience out of a pandemic? In 1918, at least fifty million people died worldwide from flu. How do you make those numbers in any way approachable, and how do you give some resonance as to just what that scale actually means? (Adams cited in Scott-Bottoms 2020: 532)

Empathy, affinity and a sense of personal connection were some of the reasons why people were drawn to participate in this individual and communal act of remembrance with one participant reflecting on the realization that the death toll from 12 October 1918 was four times the number of walkers on the day³. According to the audience survey, nearly everyone said they picked someone because of a similarity between them, regarding name, location or profession, the implication being that they had shared cultural experiences or values and that this served as a connector between the person who had died and the participant. While the 2019 event marks the 1918 tragedy that hit Philadelphia’s renowned ‘eds and meds’ community of students and medics, the opportunity to take part in something emotionally resonant and uplifting was also part of the draw for participants:

It was moving meditation, performance art, a multimedia community engagement experience, a solemn and soulful remembrance of so many that lost their lives, a historical reminder and education, a call to immunize and beautiful exploration of science, history and art. (Blast Theory 2019a)

SSD:TP was distinct from parades that use costume, floats and decorations; people wore their everyday clothes and there was a simplicity in the signage and sole object being transported (the light box). This pared back aesthetic had witnesses querying what the parade was for, but arguably the simplicity of the procession added gravitas to the moment where the name of the individual was read out in the light corridor. At the end of SSD:TP there was a gathering outside City Halls. Adams stood on a box and addressed the crowd:

This parade looks back to 1918 to remind us why that work is so important. Why we are so dependent on those who work to keep us safe. And why taking collective responsibility is vital for our future wellbeing. (SSD:TP 2019)

Looking back is simultaneously looking forward; a stranger’s life and death has been collectively commemorated and celebrated through the communal act of walking the streets. Considering SSD:TP retrospectively, it seems prophetic: a commemorative procession looking back to the 1918 flu pandemic became a premonition of COVID-19.

One audience member responded:

I went with my family. We all honored someone of different professions. Sometimes we walked together, sometimes alone, sometimes with strangers, but all felt we were together for something meaningful. (Blast Theory 2019a)

The social/political power of enacting a performative remembering of those who have been forgotten ‘co-relate’ as backward-/forwardlooking, sad/hopeful acts that embody and perform the valuing of human life.

THE PROCESSION

Described by the artist as an ‘epic poem’ about the ‘history of humanity’, Locke’s sculptural procession is rich in layered imagery and symbols. It invites visitors to witness a journey as a frozen tableau, and to walk among the various sections, each with their own sense of history and aesthetic style.

Locke’s work draws on the history of his place of birth, Guyana, which has been predominantly colonized for the past 400 years. Born in Scotland’s capital city, Edinburgh, Locke moved to Guyana as a young boy. Yvonne Singh (2019) notes the hidden connections between Scotland and Guyana, and suggests that while both countries are remote, the narrative of the Scottish Highland Clearances and a victim mentality around this event conflicts with the reality of Scotland’s complicity in slavery and therefore this history remains almost invisible. Singh discusses the multiple religions in Guyana, known as the land of six peoples, with those of African, Indian, Chinese and European descent, as well as native Amerindians and a large mixedrace group, as evidence of the colonial past that involved the forced movement of people across continents in bondage. After years of colonial rule by Dutch, British and French settlers and the enslavement of imported African people, in 1928 a new constitution made British Guiana (as it was called then) a crown colony, then in 1966 Guyana was declared independent. Locke has spoken about his memories of this as a child and how it impacted him and his work, remembering the statue of Queen Victoria being dumped and the new flag being designed, indicating that these symbols of nation influenced how he works with fabric, images and flags within his work.

Locke created many of the 150 plus sculptures during the COVID-19 lockdowns, but there are figures from previous works also included as part of The Procession (fig. 3), the lineage of earlier works recurring in the same way that some of the symbols and images of Guyana’s colonial history – the statue of the Queen, the Black soldier, the hanged man – repeat and return and are recontextualized throughout The Procession⁴. Locke reflects on time:

When you make a piece of work, you see things one way, and the piece of work has a life of its own, so how this work is perceived, over time, will change and evolve over time and that’s how it should be … The idea of who these people are, for me, in The Procession, it should be timeless because it needs to stretch beyond where we are now. (Locke 2022a)

Figure 3. Hew Locke’s The Procession. Childlike figures lead the procession (2022). Image author’s own

The timelessness is evoked by the multiple histories and contemporaneous references juxtaposed within the assemblage of figures. The carnival colours are deceptively joyful, while the images printed on the fabric and attached via décollage are disturbing, painful and sad depictions of colonial violence and imperial rule.

Although it is possible to walk alongside the figures, audiences cannot walk through the installation; demarcations on the floor indicate where access is prohibited. I was uncertain when I arrived about what way to move through. I started at the back but then thought I should have started at the front, ending up walking in every direction, back and forth, through all the joined gallery spaces thinking about history and how the journey through space was also moving me through time. This uncertainty stayed with me, and I was aware of my body in relation to the figures; a white viewer witnessing a depiction of a history that Scottish slave-owners were complicit in.

Divided into four sections to direct navigation and allow movement between galleries, the procession is split into quarters, each facing a slightly different angle and with its own aesthetic concept. The lone figure at the back of the procession is dressed in denim with a globe on his back, perhaps representing the start of the world or the beginning of human history. Figures carrying large swathes of fabric in bright colours create a carnival atmosphere and explicitly reference specific Caribbean carnival characters including Mother Sally, Midnight Robber, Pitchy Patchy (dressed in a suit made of tattered cloth of many colours) and Sailor Mas, inspired by colonial naval staff. It is unclear whether we are seeing the participant’s faces or masks and at times the combination of the familiar and unfamiliar can evoke the uncanny: the human forms are recognizable, but the faces obscured. At the end of this section, a striking figure with a yellow mask looks back as though encouraging people to follow the procession (fig. 4). The next section is alive with animal masks, individuals wearing fur and pelts, alongside black attire that gives a funereal atmosphere. There is a cortege at the front carried by figures wearing black suits and heaped with gold jewellery. A skeleton with a banner in Latin leads the way. ‘Sic transit Gloria Mundi’ translated as ‘Thus passes earthly glory’ or ‘Thus passes the glory of the world’⁵. Reminders of death signal the temporality of a human life-span.

Figure 4. Hew Locke’s The Procession (2022). A figure in a yellow mask looks backwards. Image author’s own

The section that follows has women dressed in yellow fabrics being led by tiny black mourners who surround Napoleon’s head in a box carried via palanquin⁶. The recognizable figure of Queen Victoria is framed between neoclassical pillars, and this section is led by children and a colourful horse. In the main hall a small child dressed in black and gold shimmers on a horse while a huge red velvet dress partially obscures a child. This section is led by children with drums and tiny skull masks. Two figures at the back wear the blue and yellow of the Ukraine flag and on closer inspection have patches printed with the United Nations (UN) symbol and images of Winston Churchill embossed on their bodies and faces. The inclusion of the Ukraine colours and visual references to the current war evoked for me an uncanny moment of the contexts of the work collapsing in on each other. Colonial Guyana and contemporary global politics become simultaneously experienced through this assemblage, the distance between past, present and future not linear but as Thomas claims, ‘co-related’ (2016: 194).

Locke’s garment-laden figures depicting Guyana’s colonial history could also be read, as Schechner claims, ‘as’ performance (2006: 32). If these are considered as performances within the overall performance of the procession, each of the figures or group of figures can be read as individual stories within the wider assembly. These visual vignettes include a small child in a wheelchair covered in animal print and garlands, a woman with a pregnant belly adorned in fabric printed with money, long dresses and trains made out of material depicting share certificates or images of Guyanese homes, figures with The Tourists written in pearl on the backs of their boiler suits. The garments were decorated in minute detail with guns, gold lions holding ships in their mouth and recurring symbols of boats, ropes and other icons of the shipping trade creating individual shrines. These are not simply garments; they are performances of cultural history told through the fabrics and palimpsest of images that adorn them and the undulating bodies frozen in time that wear them.

Images of leaders including Churchill and the Queen are notable by their prominence featuring on dresses, flags and horse’s attire with a series of miniature Queen-like figures dressed in black surrounding Napoleon’s death mask. Camouflage fabric and images of war are also present, interwoven subtly into underlayers of dresses, while the recurring image of a soldier with a gun appears in all four sections. Another image conveys the Fraser plantation house in Guyana, known locally as the House of a Thousand Windows and, subtly, but devastatingly, the figure of a hanged slave appears again and again on the side of a horse, the back of a garment. The Tate Galleries were founded by Henry Tate (of Tate and Lyle sugar company). Although Tate was not a slave-owner or slave-trader, the sugar trade of the nineteenth century was built on the history of colonial slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is impossible to completely extricate the histories that underpin the Tate Galleries and in siting The Procession in the Duveen Gallery, the images of The Black Star Line juxtaposed with photographs taken in the late nineteenth century of sugarcane cutters and workers loading bananas on a boat for export, highlight the historical connections between the work and its location. Describing the process of reusing a writing surface after erasure of the text, the idea of a palimpsest evokes a continual writing over, of multiple texts and meanings becoming layered (Putnam 2020: 136). In siting this work in the Tate’s Duveen gallery, there is a sense of the palimpsest of history being made visible through The Procession. Not only is this layered history depicted, it is displayed by Locke as a way of inviting acknowledgement of the terrible crimes of colonialism, an invitation to look at history, and, through references to contemporary geo-political events, to consider where we are now. Past, present, future collide; the children banging drums leading the procession could be read as warning not to allow atrocities against humanity to occur again, while simultaneously announcing that they still are.

ON THE MOVE

In The Procession, the figures enact the postures of movement, lifted heels, undulating hips, arms aloft in dance or protest, but the procession is static. Each sculpture in the vast sea of figures snaking through the Duveen Hall made of wood, cloth, cardboard, is representative, an inert ‘theatre of humanity’ installed in the space (Cumming 2022). Alongside the figures, the work also demands that the spectator processes. Locke speaks of the importance of this, of not having an elevated artwork, above the heads of visitors, but something side by side, that they walked with:

I wanted the work not to be raised up above people’s heads. I realized that the work needed to be human scale. We need to identify with these figures even though they look strange. (Cumming 2022)

There is no guidance on how to move through the galleries, on where to start and what direction to walk, and therefore ambiguity in how spectators might choose to engage with the procession, walking alongside or against the figures. The relentless moving forward of a walking procession is frozen in time, and what this stasis of The Procession invites is the possibility to move in and out of the work, the luxury to pause, to go back, to view from multiple perspectives, to consider your own relationship to the work and its histories.

Many parades and processions are commemorative, and as Solnit claims, these walking remembrances ‘knit together time and place … The past becomes the foundation on which the future will be built and those who honor no past may never make a future’ (2001: 216–17). Schneider discusses how gestures can be considered as actions extended through time and space, arguing, ‘The cut of repetition suggests that it is in the future that our pasts await us: awaiting our response, awaiting our revisions, or even awaiting our refusal – waiting for the rebound or the redress’ (2018: 286). She discusses time as concentric, claiming that it is in the past that our futures can be found, ‘nodding their greetings to try again to try again’ (ibid.). According to Schneider, if the past is reiterative, then the back and forth disturbs a ‘mythic linear flow of time’ with ‘the possibility that the past may yet have another future’ (Schneider citing DeFrantz and Gustavo Furtado 2018: 288). While rejecting linear time, Schnieder emphasizes movement back and forth, while Thomas claims that for those who have experienced violence, time can be experienced simultaneously.

If, as Schneider suggests, re-enactments are ways of disturbing linear time and that bodies enacting earlier processions provoke the possibility of a different outcome – that the past may yet have another future – then processional performance could be read as enacting time moving both forward and backward through history. It is through the procession itself that (at another moment in time) commemoration becomes premonition. As Schneider says: ‘History is, after all, that which is carried along with us as well as that which has already happened’ (2018: 286). My contention is that processional performance brings with it not only the original event that is being memorialized, but also the multiple moments and individual/collective intentions of those participating, all experienced by participants in (present) real time. Adams states that people turning up to engage in SSD:TP in itself is: ‘a tremendous act of investment; imaginative, aesthetic, creative, social investment’ (2022). By walking several miles, being willing to give their time, participants are embodying the belief that there are things that are worth coming together about, and in doing so are ‘removing something from the place of forgotten to the place of remembered’ (Adams, 2022). I have argued previously that memory is a process that is contingent on forgetting (Bissell 2022) and Adams describes this willingness to participate in collective remembering as: ‘an act of solidarity, a forward-looking act’ (2022). While the sadness of what is being memorialized is an important part of the performance procession, many of those who took part in the experience found the communal remembering to be a celebratory and affirming experience.

Both the works discussed represent/re-enact an event of significance to a specific community. While opening up the event and its aftermaths to wider audiences to allow for it to be seen anew in its re-presentation, there is also a risk of the sadness of the event and its consequences to be obscured, ignored or not fully acknowledged or understood. Scott-Bottoms reflects that SSD:TP humanizes at times incomprehensible death statistics, making one individual relatable within the large number of losses through mapping participants onto historical predecessors. Arguably, Locke’s The Procession does the same, trying to convey individuals within a large body of people, to find elements that are relatable in different ways to different viewers. The origin events of these artworks can be considered not only in terms of numbers of people killed, but instead, through procession, how they are collectively remembered.

While I acknowledge the very different contexts, forms and modes of participant engagement in these two processional works, I note that each is framed by the artists as ‘human-scale’, and ‘forward-looking’ despite depicting and re-enacting specific histories of death and hardship. Both Adams and Locke are clear that they want to provoke questions, for people to ask of the works, ‘What is this? What is going on here?’; for the processions to become a space and time for questioning and contemplation. For some participants in SSD:TP they found the memorializing procession became a positive and inspiring experience; the act of walking together evoked a sense of (temporary) community. I experienced Locke’s procession alone, and despite the bright colours and carnival-esque gaiety, I was aware that I was witnessing a procession representing those who were displaced, Jessop’s ‘transience’ realized in sculptural form.

While experiences of encountering these artworks might offer some hope or sense of affinity, it is impossible to look only to the future. I began by considering processions as rituals to process deadly events, to move forward. But for the communities who have experienced the legacy of these events firsthand: what if looking back is too painful, or there is no sense of hope for the future? What if procession as a way of ‘getting over it’ (Ahmed 2017) is not desirable or preferred? Considering time as non-linear/non-cyclical and simultaneous can offer a way of reconceiving history as more than a Western march towards progress.

CONCLUSION

As well as claiming that processional performance is for the participants, Solnit also discusses the impact on the participants in protests, who find themselves transformed into ‘the public in literal public space, no longer an audience but a force’ (2001: 226–7). I argue that participation in processional performance can be affecting and impactful, evidenced by the audience survey of SSD:TP and my own experience of The Procession, but that as a form of ‘moving forward’ from the origin events, cannot ever be deemed complete, universal or desirable. What the works do offer are spaces for contemplation and remembering, to explore sadness as ‘generosity rather than indifference’ as Ahmed states and to perhaps experience a sense of ‘hope, the future’ (Locke 2022a). David Overend and I wrote in Making Routes: ‘At times, it is not where you go that is the most important thing about journeying: it is the performance of movement itself, the transitions from place to place, the sense of mobility’ (Bissell and Overend 2021: 14). While commemorating sadness, difficulty and loss, these processional rememberings invite a walking with others, a meeting point of various moments – past, future and present – which co-relate within the experience of the work.

This work was supported by an Athenaeum Award from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Notes

1 In The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014), Ahmed takes the example of a letter to ‘friends’ of Christian Aid asking for support for victims of landmines. Ahmed argues that the letter is not about the other, but about the reader: ‘an appropriation that transforms and perhaps even neutralises their pain into our sadness. It is not so much that we are ‘with them’ by feeling sad; the apparently shared negative feelings do not position the reader and victim in a relation of equivalence’ (21). Interestingly, she also notes that the narrative of the letter is ‘hopeful’, aiming to empower the reader to give to the charity.

2 A Cluster of 17 Cases was inspired by the stories like the seventeen unsuspecting people who stayed on the ninth floor of the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong on the night of 21 February 2003. These seventeen people were subsequently identified as spreading the SARS virus to at least 546 people around the globe.

3 The most popular reason that people participated in SSD:TP was ‘To honor people who died from flu’ with 54.55 per cent of those who responded indicating this was their reason, followed by ‘To take part in something historical’ and ‘I have a relative who died from the flu in 1918’ as the second and third highest answers (Blast Theory 2019a).

4 History of works in The Procession: Cardboard palace (2002, commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London), drawings and paintings of Queen Elizabeth II as part of the Sovereign series (2005), Share (ongoing project reworking historic share certificates), The Tourists (2015, an intervention on-board HMS Belfast, commissioned by the Imperial War Museum).

5 This sentence is spoken when a new pope is consecrated and when flax is burned.

6 In 1794, slavery was abolished in all French colonies, however, Napoleon reinstated it in 1802.