#WHAT CAN A BODY DO?

Projection-bombing of monuments and sites (Hans Sloane, Robert Clayton, Tate Britian, Deptford Town Hall, Oxfam and Stock Exchange 2018

#whatcanabodydo is an ephemeral, street art project initiated by a group of seven Londoners who collaborated with Haitian artists and the general public to re-consider the image of colonial monuments in London. The project poses urgent questions about aesthetic and political representation of a shared history in public space where it can be said that the ‘people are missing’. 

An Open Call in Creole, French and English invited submissions of images that related to the theme ‘body’ to be guerrilla-projected unedited onto ten icons including the The Bank of England, the French Embassy, Tobacco Dock and Tate Britain.

In these immersive flashes was the sense of a new image emerging – clashing, erasing and corroborating stories to trouble what appears to be a fixed and stable image of the familiar city.

The guerrilla projections subsequently became a subject for an academic paper by Dr Esther Chadwick published in the Third Text Journal in 2019 with a projection-bombed Hans Sloane featuring on the front cover.

#whatcanabodydo was part of the MA Art and Politics at Goldsmiths University.