Hold Your Ground

In Hold Your Ground a female performer engages us in an intense and intimate speech act. Her language, however, is not linguistic, rather it is a sort of ‘Ur’-language, a bodily Morse code perhaps, or a gestural semantics whose meaning lies in the affective, rather than cognitive dimension. “Hold Your Ground is a companion piece to a larger film work, scripted in conjunction with the author China Miéville. Inspired by the events of the Arab Spring, and triggered by our discovery in Cairo of a pamphlet of instructions for pro-democracy demonstrators, called ‘How to Protest Intelligently’, the piece dissects the ‘semantics’ of the crowd, and the resulting performative ‘speech act’. Conceived for a site-specific exhibition at Canary Wharf, this work calls forth the struggle to turn ‘fugitive sounds’ into speech, addressing an audience predominantly in transit.” (Karen Mirza and Brad Butler)