“PSA – Public Service Announcement”, 9’49”, 2025 is an audio-visual piece influenced by by feminist Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad’s highly unusual 1963 PSA, called “The House Is Black“. The pain and dignity of the subjects is made clear without any direct narrative except what is intuited through her poems, the visuals and the sound.
Combining with found footage, my own film and sound work explores the modes and aspirations of the ‘civilised’ world’s neoliberal efforts at the conquering of nature, towards a topic central to my PhD research; today’s systematic hyper-surveillance and civilian subjugation, protest. under the guise of the seemingly ‘necessary’ oppression of protest.
Cameras watch. Cameras listen everywhere, communicating wirelessly about us to one another, to the internet, to other watchers. We feed cameras they feed us. Doing so, our neglect of other real sources of nourishment, connection and meaning results from surrendering ourselves up to the very frame in which we are reduced to data, the filtered black mirror.
What if, one day soon, the-powers-that-be decide we can’t protest anymore. Slowly we are moving towards a limited space in which to push back against those in power when our interests are compromised for the sake of their own control and profit. A protest is not a parade, just as much as it is not a riot.
Today, in the digital age the game has changed. The odds are stacked against protest. “PSA – Public Service Announcement” lures us into the uncomfortable space in which we might fully realise and then mourn the potentially lost connection between each and every human struggle in space and time, and the connection of these to our position today in the face of our dwindling protest rights.(see @Liberty HQ)
"PSA - Public Service Announcement" is on show at the London College of Fashion, UAL. On a portrait screen in one of the vitrines, for the group show 'Fashioning Frequencies', a UAL-wide exhibition exploring the transmission of identity, agency, and history, "a force reverberating through time, carrying memory, enacting resistance, and shaping future possibilities." See an extract here. 25 April – 21 June Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 5pm London College of Fashion, UAL, East Bank, 105 Carpenter’s Road, Stratford, E20 2AR The 'opening' is on Wednesday, May 21st, 5 - 8pm.
