The following speech was presented at IWM London as part of its 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund conference in 2025.
It was presented alongside the below film, documenting the delivery of a two-year long project with Compagnie XY and In Your Space Circus in Derry-Londonderry to mark the 25th Anniversary of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement in 2023.
(The speech has been lightly edited to make sense in this published context)
Welcome everyone, and thanks for your time listening to the stories we have to tell.
One of the benefits of working with an institution flexible in its commissioning process is that when they tell you ‘we would like to commission an artwork on the theme of conflict.’ And you respond, ‘I want to make a circus about peace.’ After a pause to consider, they sometimes say ‘YES!’
Jenny Waldman and Nigel Hinds at 14-18 NOW, between 2014 and 2018, were brilliant at establishing this flexible way of working. It is essential to ensuring the potential for great art.
And I thank the Imperial War Museum for holding to that flexible, artist-led process for this Legacy Fund. It is not an easy thing to do within long-standing institutions, with their built-in systems and ways of working.
Our project, After the Rain, by the talented French contemporary circus collective – Compagnie XY (now Collectif XY), was a two-year long artwork from start to finish. From the beginning of 2022 to the end of 2023.
For Collectif XY, the process is as important as the presentation of a finished work. In our case, this process involved working with communities who have lived experience of violent political conflict.
Collectif XY are one of the best contemporary circus companies in the world: an artistic collective of more than 40 artists, without hierarchies, they are socially engaged and have devised and developed projects like Les Voyages. Les Voyages is a work about building community, creating little perspective-changing adventures in people’s everyday lives and being held, and lifted, as adults.
They often ask ‘When was the last time you were lifted or carried by another human being?’ It is often the case the last time was when you were a child and the next time may be when you die.
Les Voyages is a deeply moving experience wherever you see it. Not only does it literally lift you up but it uses the human body, sculpturally, to change how you see the architecture and urban-planning of your homeplace.
It is this work that inspired me to commission them for a project in Northern Ireland.
A place where human interaction has been curfewed and curtailed for most of the latter half of the last century and where the legacy of inter-generational trauma is only now beginning to show its true face.
A place where it would also be a financial impossibility, if you know anything about the history of its arts funding.
A place where politicians insisted the arts were essential to social cohesion at the beginning of the peace process and since have disinvested in the arts so heavily the sector barely scrapes by.
Why? That is another story but thanks to IWM we, at least, managed to make this story happen.
I also knew Collectif XY had presented work in housing estates and rural townlands across Europe, quite often in places of deprivation but also in places like Ramallah, in Palestine.
I would have loved to focus our project on one distinct community of people but in our project we had a larger challenge. Impossible to work with one single community in a place of divided political loyalties, we would need to focus on public spaces that intersect between all communities and hope that After the Rain, for one day at least, could invite its audience to look at their shared public spaces a little differently.
After 25 years of making work in Northern Ireland, you can sense when its right to make something in a verbal or non-verbal artform.
In 2018, I made a project as part of 14-18 NOW. Across and in-Between with the artist Suzanne Lacy. Among many things it delivered a manifesto, having engaged over 300 people living along the border in Ireland during the height of the Brexit crisis. Its purpose was to platform the voices of residents in a landscape facing a storm of inaccurate information that would effect their lives during an increasingly globalised geo-political debate often making their voices unheard. We talked a lot, it was beautiful.
Peace is, in some ways, a more delicate subject. It is difficult to talk about peace before quickly arriving at ‘white doves.’ And in many ways, peace-building, for those of us who live through it, is less verbal and more felt.
At first there is relief, that the violence is largely ending, followed by a constant physical and spiritual resilience to sustain it. And what contemporary circus does so beautifully is non-verbally express the physical and spiritual resilience of the human body as it faces immense real or imagined obstacles.
Collectif XY’s work, in collaboration with the many decades of experience by In Your Space Circus and Circusful, who have been using circus to bring communities together across interface zones in Derry City and Belfast since ‘The Troubles,’ was a perfect opportunity to break apart some of the long-established narratives about peace-building that international leaders like to tell.
Their work simply recognises and reminds us that it is the passer-by in your public square who holds peace in their hands, and we all help ourselves by carrying each other over common obstacles.
As you watch the progress of this collaboration from Les Voyages Derry-Londonderry in 2022 to After the Rain in 2023 in the film above, I take this opportunity to reveal a couple of curatorial rules that informed the development of this project for me.
Firstly: We wanted to make an artwork about peace-building, not conflict.
2023, the year in which the final work, After the Rain, would be presented was the 25th Anniversary of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement. As these many anniversaries of conflict and peace-building arise, the global story of our experience tends to dwell on our history of violent conflict rather than our experience in peace-building. Nor does the global story recognise that, while the story of peace-building may involve a democratic end to violence, it does not mean an end to the political conflict itself.
Global and local political leaders regularly take the opportunity to applaud themselves on world stages for achieving peace but isn’t it, in fact, the general public who enact and sustain it?
We insisted:
‘Our project will make an artwork that celebrates the citizens of a place who have sustained peace in the face of political conflict.’
The physical and spiritual resilience of the citizens of this place is what this artwork will be about.
Secondly: We want this project to have a deeply felt sense of legacy.
When it comes to places with a history of violent conflict, there is always potential for any project exploring it to be re-traumatising or, at least, exploitative.
There are a lot of artists and commissioning organisations in the rest of the UK and around the world that want to make work in places like Northern Ireland. Quite often about our historical conflict. They also often, deservedly or not, suffer from a public perception of having rolled into town and disappeared post-performance, having got what they needed.
We insisted:
‘Our project must build a meaningful long-term relationship with local communities and artists.’
To start, we gifted the city an artwork – Collectif XY’s Les Voyages Derry-Londonderry, unannounced at the beginning of the project in 2022. No promotion, no branding, just a week-long introduction to the company, through surprise interventions in and with communities across the city. A happening that, at the end, said ‘This is not the end, but the beginning. We are coming back.’
After the Rain would be the result of work by a community of friends in love with a place.
It is very rare, but there is nothing more exciting than, when delivering a public artwork, the city starts telling you about what is happening as if you didn’t know. Local security guards and schoolchildren and supermarket workers; gossip was working over-time – ‘Who ARE these weirdos who don’t speak, are dressed in black and lift you up?’ The rumour mill was so hyped on social media, the BBC had to investigate and discover us to tell our story.
To have any integrity around this subject of conflict, in a place like ours, the project had to be led by artists with a keen sensitivity about trauma, people and place. It had to be a collaboration that was locally ‘owned’ within the city of Derry, its communities and creatives.
Collectif XY and In Your Space Circus commissioned and worked with local musicians, poets, choirs and street artists. We established training schemes involving local acrobatic circus performers from across the island. Most of whom were cast in the final work. Some of whom have since gone on to perform with Collectif XY professionally on international tours.
And In Your Space Circus have started renovations on a building that will become a Circus School in the city, now with lifelong partners in Collectif XY.
This project was a series of beautiful moments:
A little old lady carried uphill with her Tesco’s shopping.
A conga-line through Poundland, where a young man is held aloft and paraded through his street on a human throne.
A drunk man on his phone outside a pub, continuing his conversation regardless of being lifted and cradled by six French strangers.
All ending in the gathering crowd forming human bridges with their own backs, upon which the acrobats walked across Guildhall Square leaving the crowd holding each other, having formed the base of a human tower, not knowing the performers had already left.
Artists and arts organisations are interminably asked what real social value their work has. We complete so many evaluation forms, never read by civil servants and politicians, only for them to ask us again, every election cycle what need is there for our existence?
This is why.
