Saturday 28 June 2008
Event: 12.00 - 16.00
Tate Britain Museum
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG
Duffield Room

Part of Tate Triennial 2009
Prologue 2: Exiles
Curated by Nicolas Bourriaud

projectdescription
We Come From Your Future is a sound investigation into the future of anti-racism in the UK. It asks how the public discourse on ethnic-otherness, diversity, and multiculturalism may contribute to the very conditions of racism? How has the erasure of terms like anti-racism, racist violence, and justice from the official bureaucratic language actually worked to both conceal and foment new convergences of racial tension? How has the composition and re-composition of migration in the UK contributed to new lines of anti-racist experience and opened up to new fields of struggle? What are the obstacles for a re-constitution of an anti-racist movement?

In a situation in which we have listened to the pronunciation of racism's end much too often, we are in need of a culture of communication and collaboration that would bridge existing gaps in connectivity and discussion. In our mind's eye, racism shimmers loftily. It intersects with sexism, it blurs with exploitation. What is the reason for racism's astonishing resistance to critique?

We Come From Your Future starts today. It takes us to sites of current struggle that are not always aware of their historical antecedents; it listens to stories which we neither know nor seek to know in the present; it claims that those stories stem from a history that is embedded in our contemporary situation, and that belongs already to our experience. Realized through a combined method of field-based interviews and site-specific recordings the sound investigation will cohere in a performance with a formal protocol and a leading question.

We ask: "What is the sound of anti-racism?"

Such a question explores the dynamic relationship between sound and political organising derived from our recent and ongoing involvement in anti-racist struggle in England's rural southwest. It is from the experiences, questions and urgencies born of the emergent political practices in this region that we proceed.

To preview Ultra-red's dispatches for the future go to:
www.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/ultra-red.shtm
Tate's Intermedia Art programme is curated by Kelli Dipple

For more information on The Monitoring Group go to:
www.monitoring-group.co.uk
Freephone Helpline: 0800 374 618

(Organized by Manuela Bojadzijev, Janna Graham, and Elliot Perkins with assistance from Dont Rhine and Robert Sember.)