THE MANDJET

Sarah Al-Sarraj

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Introduction

Nina Davies

You're listening to Future Artefacts FM , a bi-monthly podcast/broadcast featuring speculative fiction audio works by artists and writers produced and presented by Nina Davies,

Rebecca Edwards

Niamh Schmidtke

and Niamh Schmidtke, on RTM

and also available on podcast channels.

The programme focuses on fictional works intended for broadcast to carve out a better understanding of the now by exploring various interpretations of the future.

Together with guests we discuss the mechanics of different types of storytelling to reveal the complexities of contemporary culture. Let’s get started.

All

Let’s get started.

This miniseries is commissioned by Henry Moore Institute to accompany their exhibition, Phantasmagoria Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, open 15th May, 2026 to 30th of August, 2026.

For more information, just visit the Henry Moore Institute website.

The opinions expressed by contributors in this episode do not necessarily reflect the views of the Henry Moore Foundation, its trustees, employees or associates.

Artist Introduction

Okay, welcome back to Future Artefacts FM. As per usual, I'm your host, Rebecca Edwards.

I'm Nina Davies.

And I'm Niamh Schmidtke.

RE
Welcome to episode 37 and the third episode of our new mini series with the Henry Moore Institute around their exhibition, Phantasmagoria Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age.

And we're here today with our second artist commission of this new mini series, Sarah Al-Sarraj. Welcome to the show, Sarah. How are you?

I'm good. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Yeah. Thank you for being here. We're recording this remotely again. And we have a super international group of artists for this mini series, which is really great. And you're speaking with us from?

From Paris right now.

Amazing.

So just to I'm just going to give a little introduction for our listeners. So Sarah Al-Sarraj is a visual artist and cultural worker based between Pittsburgh and London. Her work centers on world building as a creative and critical process where painting and immersive technologies are understood as portals to other worlds. Predicated on the belief that our world was designed in service of imperial violence, she builds new life worlds rooted in land, spirit and ancestry.

Currently working with game engines, she's interested in appropriating military simulation technologies to build uncolonizable realms inspired by Global Majority knowledge systems and emerging quantum thought.

Her creative practice is informed by working in movements at organizations such as Forensic Architecture, the Inclusive Mosque Initiative and Healing Justice London. She's inspired by the tangible material potential of visionary practice in global liberation movements and she occasionally lends her hands to illustration and graphic design for various groups.

And you've also got a long list of places that you've shown, which never lends itself great to radio, but we can confirm that Sarah has a great CV.

Thank you.

And we're really excited to have Sarah's work as part of these three artist commissions. And today we're really excited to be premiering a new work by Sarah called The Mandjet, which is a 15-minute radio play. Before we listen to the work, which is a little over 15 minutes long, you were saying just before we started recording Sarah that The Mandjet is the name of a boat. Can you expand on this a little bit? Just before we start to listen?

It's the name of an ancient Egyptian vessel, I think like a solar bark that's meant to... Something to do with the afterlife, I think guiding people from one realm to the next.

Oh, so it's like a mythical, it's a mythical...

Yeah, mythical ship.

Well, as you listen to the work, you'll hear particularly why it's quite a helpful introduction into the piece in terms of thinking about water, thinking about realms. And I think we're very excited to be having a radio play again on the work in this specific broadcast setting.

Sarah, you said that this project is an extension of your show at Eastside Projects, which is, is that still on or is that finished now?

It's finished. Hopefully it will be shown in more locations that work. But yeah, it was a commission from Eastside Projects. So it was really great to be able to expand it into a sound piece, like I guess my first sound piece, which we recorded at Mosaic Rooms. Shout out.

And what we're going to do is we're going to, in the show notes, we're going to share a link to some of the visuals from the show. So if you want to take a look and kind of like see where, like the sort of the genesis of where the sound work has come from, we urge you to take a look.

Yeah, really beautiful paintings in that show, Sarah. Huge paintings.

Yeah.

So we'll welcome you back in about 15 minutes and talk with Sarah more about the work.

The Mandjet

Well, it has been a rather wet and windy 24 hours, and I'm afraid to say...

The very idea of dominating the natural world.

There are several flood alerts currently in force from the environment.

And the River Amp has burst her banks, burst her banks.

Stands from the domination of human by human, human by human.

For six days and six nights, the wind blew.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, life in the tempestuous waters of East London, this is your host, Dean Sinca.

You're locked in right now to The Mandjet, where we talk everything current, monitoring the human costs of rising flood levels across the UK, including shrinking borders, migrations and local displacements, as well as adaptive acts and tidal subcultures coming straight from the people, bow, bow, bow. Now, my dear listeners, we're going to be exploring the newly formed and very misunderstood community growing at the edges of society.

Across the UK's eastern shores, we'll be having an exclusive live conversation with the Bitter River Collective, or the BRC, as they're commonly called, exploring their practices of economic self-sufficiency, anarchist organizing, yeah, and the most controversial of all, an escalation to violence in their recent environmental campaigns. Branded a terrorist organization by the Home Secretary, we'll be speaking to their elusive and enigmatic leader known only as Fatimah, about their political philosophy as well as their recent bombing of the Thames water barrier. But first, as always, our channels are open to you, yeah you, our listeners, to call in with your questions, concerns and daily shenanigans.

Oh, looks like we have our first caller. Hello, caller number one, you're under air. Please give us your name and location.

Yeah, this is Dan, big fan, long time listener.

Hi, Dan.

Thank you for your support, mate. Where are you calling from?

So I'm from East Yorkshire, but me and my family are currently staying in temporary housing in Sheffield. We've been moved three times in the past two years and honestly…

Wow, three times?

It's just getting ridiculous. We're all fed up. They keep saying they're controlling the water levels, that we'll be able to go back home eventually. Then after six months, we get a new flood warning, we have to pack everything up again.

Ah, man. I'm so sorry to hear that. I hope you and your family are staying safe up there, Dan. Three times in two years? Hey, that's rough. Who's your family then, Dan?

Me, my parents, my auntie, my little cousins. You know, my parents, they're getting old, and my cousins are supposed to be in school. We just can't keep moving like this, man.

Of course.

They keep saying, oh, soon, but it's just lip service. They said they'd clear the water and reinforce the foot barrier. But unless it's a financial district or a rich neighbourhood, those places, they're miraculously saved each time. And you think, well, if they can keep those low lying places safe, why can't they keep our homes safe?

That is a great question, Dan. I think a lot of people resonate with what you're saying. Now, are you able to access clean drinking water?

There's a standpoint. It's around the corner. At last place, it was miles away. You couldn't even access it by car. At this rate, might as well join those terrorists at the coast. Anything's better.

Okay. Okay. Whoa. Okay. Well, sending you strength from keeping your family in our prayers, Dan, we hope you get home soon, inshallah.

Just a reminder to anyone calling in that any expression of intention to join prescribed or soon to be prescribed groups can be investigated by the state's counterterror wing. Now, on to our next caller. Hello, caller number two, you are on the air. Give us your name and location, please.

Hi, it's Phoebe She/her calling in from Richmond.

Hi, Phoebe.

Yeah, I'm just calling in to say I think it's really upsetting that you're giving those terrorists a platform. What about those people they killed in the Thames bombing? One of them had kids, a construction worker. The Bitter River Collective are not some subversive liberation army like they claim. They have such a great idea for how to handle the flood crisis. They could cooperate with the civil service or with the scientists and engineers on the front lines trying to manage the devastation.

Right, Phoebe. I hear you.

They are using violence for the sake of optics. I think it's really disappointing you're giving them this space. You know, what about the people they have displaced with their little commune? People who have lived in those regions for generations, who have been told they basically have two options. Stay and live under a new regime, or leave and go looking for housing like everyone else.

Okay, Phoebe. Thank you. You raised some excellent points.

And as always, the Mandjet is a place for discussion, for discomfort, for growth and nuance. Now listeners, as promised, we have an exclusive interview with Fatimah coming up. This will be the Mysterious Leader's first ever live interview. We'll be hearing all about the fight on the Eastern Shoreline after the break.

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Are you feeling lost?

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Alright, we are back.

I hope you guys are as excited as I am for our next interview with The Bitter River, a group promising to reorganize society along principles of environmental justice and equity. Hello Fatimah, are you with us?

Hello, yes.

Wow, hi. It's great to hear from you. We know we're very lucky to have you on the show and we hope that this can be a chance for you to speak in your own words.

Thank you. We consider you an ally. We typically avoid public speaking so as to not have our message co-opted and distorted by the media. Our mission statement and demands are on everything we produce.

Right, yeah. So as you know, here on The Mandjet, we consider ourselves to be the voice of the people. Now, I know you guys are currently in hiding for your own safety. Thank you for risking the call. Can you give us any information at all about your surroundings?

Let's just say the sun is setting, the starlings are roosting in the weeds.

Beautiful.

You can hear surveillance drones buzzing overhead.

Asgad, no way, that's tough, man. Now, the Home Secretary calls you a lot of terrorists.

We currently wanted for a list of offenses including unauthorized occupation of private property, violent disorder, destruction of protected infrastructure, and most notably the criminal damage and sabotage at a Thames Barrier Control System resulting in the deaths of four civilians. To these men, you're just what they've been looking for. Heroes of an environmental disaster, risen out the ashes of decades of austerity in the legacy of militant resistance groups of the past. To other people, your methods are reckless, dangerous, violent, unnecessarily so. What do you say to people, people like caller number two, who think your group is violent?

Our group is violent. To those who find our methods unsavoury, we generally believe that the huge displacement of masses, the most vulnerable in British society, including the sick and the elderly, to protect a chosen few is violent. And the Thames Barrier? The state's response to mass flooding and displacement was not protecting the people, it was protecting London elites and government officials from the consequences of the climate crisis that they helped create. Every day we have people coming, traveling from across the country to join our community, people who were struggling to live.

Right, so there are a lot of people listening from home right now who I'm sure resonate with what you're saying, yeah? Still there are those who would say that the Bitter River just takes things a few steps too far. Now what would you say to those who feel that any loss of life is just too great a cost for the system change that you're promising? That this just isn't the way that's creating more chaos and that there might be more peaceful diplomatic ways of going about it?

Peaceful diplomacy? Wow. Well, we would say that you can't fight a violent system with negotiation when there is blood on the negotiating table. Please remember that in our case, the state was the first aggressor, sending huge armoured vehicles, destroying our homes, poisoning our water supplies, threatening our food security, and attempting to drain our marshes when they should be draining the streets of their cities. As I mentioned, there were drones overhead, which we regularly shoot down. We live under near constant surveillance. I don't want to argue about violence. Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.

Decolonization? What is that Fanon yeah? Some people might say, well, we're in England.

What does this conversation have to do with decolonization?

Do you read history?

Ah, well, I mean...

Do you know the history of the land enclosure in this country? The wetlands we inhabit used to be a commons owned by the people. You know who used to live there?

What? English people, innit?

The Fen Tigers. Described by the history books as a primitive, wild, uncivilized society. And you know why? Because they had their own way of living in harmony with the land. They had their own economies. They were farmers, fishermen. And you know what the state did? With their Dutch engineers to civilize the wild people. They dug ditches and installed gates.

They turned millions of acres of marshland into privately owned agricultural land. You can read about it. They used to call it the greatest environmental disaster the country had ever seen.

Now we are living in the greatest environmental disaster the country has ever seen.

Okay, so what? They successfully drained the marshes and then the water returned?

With the flood and so did we. Since we moved here, huge numbers of migratory species have returned.

And you are at risk of being drained, you say?

Yes. You know, you mentioned Fanon. Like he said, our most essential value first and foremost is the land. Or for us, the water. And just like the previous inhabitants of this land who resisted for hundreds of years, we will resist this. They didn't need state control and neither do we. We build what we need. What we can't build, we trade with our allies overseas. We have a food program. We have doctors. We provide free childcare and schooling for children.

You mentioned people joining you. Can I ask what sort of people?

I can't say.

OK, well, what would one need to do to join your group?

To live among us. To participate according to your capabilities. To be a member of our community. And in return, we provide.

Can you share a bit about your policy on immigration?

We don't have a policy on immigration because we don't have borders. We lie in a borderless expanse of interconnected marshes, but we inhabit the coastline. So when migrants arrive, we lead them to safety.

The Home Secretary has accused you of hacking into two migrant processing centres, causing the entire system to collapse. Huge amounts of data gone, waiting times increased. Vulnerable people at risk of deportation.

Those processing centres were detention camps for climate displaced people. No one was deported. We liberated those facilities and offered anyone who wanted the opportunity to join us.

Some would argue that's not much of a choice.

Look, right now there's not much difference between non-British so-called immigrants and British so-called citizens. Look around. 17% of the country are living out of a suitcase. And if we define the borders by the coastline, which is historically how it has been defined, then it's a much smaller state than what it was pre-flood and shrinking smaller still. Now you have a land problem, a space problem. You have 17% of the country internally displaced. You have overcrowding. Now what happens when there's another epidemic? People living in cramped conditions, who do you think is going to be safe on a shrinking island? You know where they used to put migrants? On giant prison boats. The water is where they put everything that they do not want to see. But it's everywhere now and swallowing everything. Some people have come here just because they'd rather accept this as a new reality, learn how to navigate by boat, how to catch fish. And so we are practicing for the first time in modern history, a borderless state, one that cannot be invaded by armoured vehicles.

The Home Secretary and much of the mainstream media is called the Bitter River a terrorist organisation. Do you have a response to that?

How do you define a terrorist?

Answering questions with a question?

We can show our next target.

Target?

Britannia Water.

What? When you say target?

Britannia Water are responsible for the diversion of millions of litres of purified water to private data centres while our children drink contaminated floodwater. They discharge untreated wastewater into flood-affected areas, killing ecosystems that communities rely on. Their distribution points neglect communities who need it the most, sometimes forcing people to walk miles for clean water.

Alright, alright, alright. Hey, hey, hey. Remember we spoke?

Collecting data at their water distribution points and selling it to the government, tracking the movement of marginalised communities.

Alright, alright. Hey, hey.

If they do not stop, we will attack their headquarters.

Uh, hello, Fatima. Hello. Right. Well, it appears we've lost them. That was our show, guys. Be sure to tune in next week.

This is the Mandjet every Thursday on Radio Current.

Conversation

Okay, welcome back. You just heard The Mandjet by Sarah Al-Sarraj. Sarah, to kick things off, I was wondering whether you could introduce us to this world a little bit. As the work progresses, more of this world is revealed to us, whether it's via the host or the regional accents of the callers phoning in. A map slowly starts to formulate in my imagination.

This is obviously set in the UK, but the landscape sounds like it has changed considerably and might be set in a not-too-distant future. Thinking about your work with game engines and as an artist, how did you build this world?

It really all started with this commission from Eastside Projects, and I kind of like at the very beginning, sort of pitched the project as like, I want to go into the archive and I want to find all of these moments, historical moments of resistance that may not have been kind of fully recorded. And then I started doing some kind of archival research. But a lot of what I was finding, I guess I was kind of interested in finding things which were more related to global majority solidarities. But I think that with a lot of global majority struggles, especially post-colonial struggles, a lot of it was related to like land and resource and stuff like that. And then I was reading this book called War Torn Ecologies. And I was kind of thinking about the kind of lessons that can be learned from global majority eco-resistance. And I then started to look at eco-resistance histories within the UK. And that kind of took me to researching this history in the east of England and this kind of history of drainage. And then looking at, because a lot of my work is kind of inevitably becomes kind of speculative, I guess, or becomes kind of this sort of urge to world build and story tell. I found these flood prediction maps of the UK.

So you could like kind of change the dials depending on like, you know, if global warming continues as it's going and the kind of worst scenarios and like large parts of the UK would be submerged by water, which is already starting to happen now. So I was kind of looking at this future map of the UK and then I started to imagine, okay, well, what if this kind of all of these kinds of wetland resistance movements, what if a future flooded UK made a lot of them become possible again and I was thinking a lot about the kind of communities that I’m in and eco-anarchism and imaging that a lot of people would move to these wetlands, to these future flooded lands, instead of trying to go further and further upland. What would it mean to embrace these wetlands and build these kinds of autonomous communities there, in a kind of similar way to how they did in the past with these wetlands, how fenland people did in the past.

That reminds me of, have you seen, I saw on TikTok, there's like a pub somewhere like off the Thames. I think it's like more inland, which like one of it's like advertising, like how they advertise the pub is that like halfway through the day when the tide comes up, the pub floods.

Oh wow.

And it's kind of done almost like in this like, like almost like it's a boogie thing.

Glamorizing, glamorizing flooding.

Interesting.

There was this essay, which we're also kind of researching for another episode as part of this, this mini-series by this writer, Roisin Agnew, which is called Bog Communism. And I guess in Ireland, like the wetland would be the bog. And one of the things she talks about is during their Cromwellian plantations in Ireland, which is one of the more violent ones, Cromwell famously saying kind of to hell or to Connaught, to enforcing Irish people who wouldn't assimilate to the part of the country that was kind of the least possible to grow food. Many people fled to the bogs because the British, the planters, didn't know how to navigate those lands, but the Irish did, having grown with them. So in terms of thinking about the wetland as a space of resistance also, in terms of the role of navigation, which I think is then interesting when we talk about the title of the work being the Mandjet, being kind of this mythical vessel to travel through water. There's something about the relationship to land in terms of how knowledge of land is learnt, is passed down, and becomes sort of in, let's say, the part of the land that is not typically considered the most desirable.

I mean, here in this pub on the Thames, it feels like a satire to be like, oh, let's embrace the flood when it's actually a really damaging thing. It means that people, like shop owners, typically lose loads and loads of money because they can't be insured for floodplain zones. And then typically those who can afford the rents or those who have the least ability to replace stock, let's say. And that's not even talking about housing. And that's talking about it in the Western world. But I think there's something about, in this work, how you talk about these marshlands, these wetlands, as spaces where kind of otherwise, or possibility, emerges.

Yeah.

Both the resistance of sort of being pushed into that space in terms of not having another variety of land to live safely in. But when placed in that means, sort of, yeah, what types of kind of resistance, or what types of living with become possible.

Yeah, it's really interesting. One of the kind of main inspirations for me was this essay by Aminah Salati on e-flux, and it's called Wetlands of Resistance. Really brilliant essay where she's talking about the marshes of southern Iraq, and how it was the kind of marshland communities, the marsh Arabs, the Ahwar, inhabit these marshes.

And during the 1990s, Saddam drained these marshes as a means of kind of, there was a lot of sort of rebels riding among the reeds in the marshes. So there is kind of this like history globally with wetlands. I think because they're impenetrable by armoured vehicles, because their borders are constantly changing with the seasons, and because the reeds in wetlands are often difficult to see through with radar and stuff like that, they become these kinds of spaces that rebel groups or like, even I think there's a history of like, marinage and people escaping to marshes. So there's a really kind of interesting global connected history of people who inhabit wetlands, building a sort of autonomous, independent, self-sufficient livelihoods and ways of being and economies and that being viewed very negatively by the state which wishes to centralise and hold power and assimilate these communities into a larger nation state effort.

So when you talk about the draining of these marshlands, is the purpose of draining them to regain control over those areas when you're saying that like, because marshlands can't be occupied or entered by like, military vehicles, for example.

I guess it's kind of twofold because in the case of the UK, drainage started, I think, in the mid 1600s. And it was partially to kind of like, assimilate these quote unquote wild and primitive people who lived in these marshlands. So it was really interesting for me because when I was reading all of this like literature, I realized that it was a very kind of colonial language that was used to describe these people who live in the ferns. And so it's partially to kind of like assimilate these communities and partially because marshlands, wetlands, are kind of like carbon sinks. So they store a lot of, I guess, like carbon in the soil and they’re extremely fertile land once drained.

So drainage in the UK was kind of turned these sort of free-flowing marshes into agricultural productive land. So there was kind of like a agro-industrial purpose for that kind of drainage.

And with Iraq, like you can find British documents where they're discussing what to do with these marshes in the south of Iraq. So there's a lot of technology, the kind of drainage technology, I think it emerged from, I think it was a Dutch engineer who came up with this technology and then gave it to Britain. And then when the UK was, had administrative control over a lot of parts of the global majority, there was also this consideration of like, what do we do with these wetlands that we find here? How can we maybe make them productive? Should we install a dam and things like that? Which yeah, is really an interesting kind of link to how this kind of technology moves through these kinds of like means of control around the globe.

The story and situation is told through multiple perspectives, the radio host, caller number one, who's frustrated by being relocated several times, caller number two, who is unhappy with the platforming of the Bitter River Collective. The two kind of ads that you have after that, that kind of are almost like the in between of the caller section and the main host, who is Fatimah, the leader of the Bitter River Collective. And then of course, the radio show host. Do you feel like these characters and ads represent the world as you've designed it, or do you feel like there's aspects of the world that you've left out because you couldn't fit them in, or whether you've purposefully left out within the work?

Honestly, I think there's definitely loads of the world that I've left out. I think that there's this thing that happens with world building, which is I think slightly more associated with literature.

When I come up with ideas for things, I generate a huge amount of text and fake newspapers. When I was working with Eastside, it was like I made so much writing and they were like, we can't include all of this. We can't have many, many pages of exhibition handouts for this mostly visual work. So I think I come up with a lot of different ideas and then I start thinking about, what represents the range of different opinions within this world?

When I was younger, I remember reading The Sound and the Fury, and there was this gigantic appendix that Folkner had written, and it was a thousand pages or something where he had just kept going with these characters and what happens to them. But I think in selecting the conversation that was had in this radio play, and selecting which characters would be the protagonist, I wanted to select things that would best mirror and hold the lens to relevant discussions happening today.

Where did these characters come from, or did you base these characters on anyone specifically? I'm assuming they're probably all amalgamations of loads of people or things that you come across. When you say there's a main character, obviously Fatimah is the main character, but also I feel like when I'm listening, I do feel like the radio host is also a main supporting character.

Yeah. I spent the most time trying to develop the radio host character. I was imagining in this future world that this radio show would be something that people regularly listen to and a host that people feel very held by and that this radio show would be a container for, I think he even says at one point, we consider ourselves to be the voice of the people. So I was imagining it to be like an anarchist radio show. Quite interestingly, in some of my research, I found that at a time when the BBC had a monopoly on broadcast and radio in the UK, I think in the 60s, the pirate radio stations, a lot of them were operating offshore on boats because they were technically outside of British jurisdiction.

Oh, like pirate radio.

Yeah, yeah.

Quite literally pirates.

Yeah, yeah. But the host, it was actually a really great working relationship because when I kind of developed these characters, I was like, I really need to find people, because I don't know voice actors. I was like, I need to find people who can quite authentically embody these characters and bring the right kind of energy. So for the radio host, the voice actor is Raza Tariq, and he just does an absolutely fantastic job. When we were recording it, he was like kind of adding notes and like think kind of like really took on that character and sort of was part of the development of that quite distinct like voice and energy.

And then when I was writing the character of Fatimah, who I would say is kind of like this main character kind of tried to build up some suspense in the script for like, you know, she's coming, she's coming, and then we get to hear her.

I was watching a lot of interviews with like, resistance fighters and kind of revolutionary leaders. So I was like watching interviews with like, Angela Davis and Hassan Qanafani and some other figures whose names I might not mention. And just thinking kind of like particularly following the sort of cadence of the conversation, like the way that it would begin, you know, maybe there'd be some kind of coy remarks and then it would kind of, so the way that I wrote it was that there are moments where that character, that she kind of erupts into like very clear, concise language where she's speaking with a certain kind of confidence, so as not to be misunderstood and I kind of like, I guess like the main word is like conviction.

And when I was writing the vocal descriptions, I was like, that is really the word for this character. So I was kind of basing it on these resistance fighters and revolutionary leaders of the past and just the way in which they speak with so much clarity to like very clearly get the point across. Which interestingly, as I was like doing this research, I kind of realized that I think that in today's media, a lot of the way in which people are interviewed, there is such a strong agenda from the kind of interviewer that it’s so hard to actually be given space to talk.

Yeah, the amount of interviews I've seen where it's just like the struggle of the guest, trying to put the interviewer back in their place. And to this point where they end up not talking about anything, because it ends up just becoming about this struggle of the two people talking, just trying to get their opinion or their angle. Well, I guess the interviewer is trying to get their angle in and the interviewee is just trying to answer the question.

Yeah, but I think especially when you have media sources like the BBC, because a lot of major media outlets in the UK are owned by people with, let's say, more conservative politics.

It's kind of the basic terminology that you're using in many of those conversations when you're talking about politics or resistance movements. You can kind of see even in the way in which the BBC speaks, or rather doesn't speak, about Palestine. And whenever you have people coming on air to then discuss that there is a genocide happening and it's despite multiple global organizations also making declarations also stating that there are war crimes.

It's not, it's been sort of, let's say, backed up by these institutions that we typically trust. There's still a resistance and it becomes an argument over terminology rather than the very real violence that is happening.

And I think what's interesting here is that the fact that you're using it as like this pirate or this anarchist radio space is that the radio host is actually is having a conversation with Fatimah.

You know, he's not pushing her down or he's not trying to shut down the points that she's making. He's pushing back and almost in trying to be a representative of his listenership as well.

You know, he's saying, you know, like this, like this woman who's stating, she agrees that the, you know, the politics of the, in that version of, or that future of the UK is wrong, but she disagrees with the violence that this collective is enacting. And maybe before you come in, I'll use that to kind of jump into the third question, which you've answered parts of, but I think it might be nice to contextualize it even, even more in the research that you've been doing, you know, in the fact that, you know, we are teased with hearing from a bitter collective's leader, we are teased with like hearing from Fatimah, and you're talking about the specific cadence of her voice. And she speaks explicitly to the violent actions that her collective has been doing, you know, the bombing of infrastructure, which has also led to loss of life as a form of environmental activism, as forms of direct action. And it was reminding me of things such as the arson attacks that the Earth Liberation Front did during the 90s, who were for a time the most wanted terrorists in the US. It's making me think about groups like the Black Panthers or the Suffragettes movements back in the UK in the early 1910s. And more specifically, she's referencing Fanon's decolonization is always violent from his book, The Wretched of the Earth. I wanted to ask a bit more about how you developed. I mean, Fatimah's character, you know, you're talking about Angela Davis as a reference point, but I guess also maybe some of the policies behind the Bitter River Collective and maybe where some of those ideas have come from, you know, is it, are you thinking about these historical direct action groups or are there other places that, lets say the things, the policies that has driven them towards that kind of violence, or the way that they feel they need to do that type of violence?

Yeah. So part of my, kind of within my research, I was reading and also watching this, this chapter in The Wretched of the Earth. There's like a film that was made based on it and it's like really excellent. It's narrated by Lauryn Hill and it kind of looks at all of these kind of different like workers’ struggles in Africa that are sort of very closely linked with colonialism and companies and extraction of resources and things like that and how people are kind of like organizing against that. And like the role of violence and interviews, some like Western colonizers. And I guess I was kind of looking at this, what feels like a very topical debate around the use of violence by the oppressed and the kind of debates that are like often had in, I think, particularly like the Western world around kind of like whether that is permissible for oppressed people to be using violence, but then like just like the intense hypocrisy of that conversation, because often those having that conversation are not experiencing the kind of deep, structural, direct and indirect violence that is oppression, land dispossession, economic violence, like all of these very sharp experiences, racialized violence, white supremacy, ableist violence. I think often these debates are had by individuals who are not experiencing that and you know everything happening today in this country around the proscription of certain groups carrying out direct action in accordance with international human rights law and things like that. And so I was trying to unpack a lot of these terms that we use like violence, and what do we consider violence to be. And the way that it is really, the idea of violence becomes very individualised and becomes about one person and another person, and these four civilian deaths in counter to the, in this future world, the hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths that emerge through more indirect means. Even in the UK the loss of a hundred thousand people during COVID due to ableist, violent, inadequate policies. There is a discussion about what we consider violence to be and also what we consider terrorism to be and how that term is really mobilised and weaponised to refer to, in a very racialised way, to refer to specific groups which are moving in contrast to the state. And building power and building community and doing a lot of support work, but it’s seen as this huge threat and there’s this inordinate response, securitisation and even in my research looking at how we often associate terrorism with Islamic extremism but that’s a fairly new phenomenon which was heavily pushed by Benjamin Netanyahu who was the first person who held a summit in the US, or maybe it was is in Israel, which was to try and align terrorism with Islamic extremism very specifically and the way that that language, the way terrorism as an idea continued to gain prominence and is selectively applied. I guess I’m looking at how both terrorism and violence are these terminologies that very pulled and twisted and mobilised as with the war on terror within the media, things like that I guess.

Once you use the term terrorist, it dismantles or takes away any power of what a proscribed organisation is trying to demonstrate. In the UK it is an offence to show support for any proscribed group, but then in terms of what those organisations, I guess part of what I’m thinking about is the IRA and in Irish history the IRA comes from what was the resistance army which gained Irish independence in the 1920s and then you had the progression of the provisional IRA which obviously were very violent and specifically targeting people.

As soon as you prescribe an organization like that, there's a part of it where let's say the history of Irish independence becomes complicated in a way where you are unable to celebrate Irish independence because it's wrapped up in this organization that are terrorists or are labelled as such. And so I think the thing is when you're talking about these forms of violence is also about what types of violence are we discussing because let's say in the case of Northern Ireland, when we talk about the violence that the British state has done in Northern Ireland, we're able to talk about that freely. But when we talk about it from, let's say, those who are resisting it, we can't speak about that freely. And so it sort of, it stops the conversation.

It stops the ability to like talk about it in this nuanced way. As happens in this radio play, you know, he's trying to have a nuanced conversation with Fatimah. How do we come to a point where we can resolve or how do we come to a point where we can have a conversation rather than, let's say, just separating out and saying, no, this is the line we cannot discuss.

You know, the violence of that, the violence of that, I guess I'm thinking.

Of that kind of censorship, within this whole kind of conversation, there's actually a book by Sohaima Mansour Khan called Tangled in Terror, and she's speaking about her experience as a Muslim woman, as a Muslim hijabi woman.

And I think she kind of comes to this conclusion, if I'm recalling correctly, that's like, we just should not be using this word, this word of terrorist and terrorism because like, you know, historically like Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist, right? So when things eventually prevail, history is kind of rewritten from a very different vantage point. Yeah.

Sarah, in the work, the interview with Fatimah raises questions about who controls access to water and how resistance movements are framed as either legitimate political actors or as threats. And within this framing, the work also references the enclosure of marshlands and struggles over access to clean drinking water. I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about why water became the central focus of this project. And I'm also interested in whether you were thinking about more recent examples, such as water privatization. You know, Fatima talks about the drainage of the English fens in the 17th century and the resistance of the fen tigers.

But I was wondering if there were other historical events that you were influenced by whilst you were imagining the Bitter River Collective?

Yeah, I guess, as I've said, like marshlands often become this kind of site of resistance.

And there were kind of things, I guess there were kind of things converging while I was making these drawings for East Side Projects relating to water, specifically relating to water as like a kind of boundaryless entity, which moves kind of according to its own logic. So while I was making the works, I had a friend of mine was on the Samood Freedom Flotilla and she was kind of like sending these long messages. And there were some messages that she was sending, which was talking about how being on this, this experience for her of being on this boat really made her understand like how futile and ridiculous borders are.

And I think in the UK, as an island, as a group of islands, I think we have a very strange kind of relationship to water, where we kind of, I don't know, there's this like colonial history of like Britannia, Britannia rules the waves. And this kind of relationship took very defensive borders in the UK. And so the idea of a future flood that actually shrinks, kind of like shrinks the country or starts to like engulf the country and the kind of response to that of people to either kind of like, I guess in my head, thinking that people would either move further inland and be part of this internally displaced community on dry land or sort of embrace the water and go outwards and be, learn to kind of like have a more, I guess like island kind of experience or like a more kind of like water informed way of being is kind of what I was imagining would happen. And yeah, it's interesting when I was really looking into the history of the Fen Tigers, it's a very interesting kind of terminology because the tiger actually comes from like a French word. It's not the British word tiger. It's like a French word that means peasant. But then it kind of evolved in Cambridgeshire to refer to this like elusive like I think big cat that people saw kind of like stalking around. And then from Cambridgeshire, there were like a couple of boxes who were like really good, I think like boxers, maybe wrestlers. And they were referred to as like the Fen Tiger, this person. So there's kind of something interesting about I guess like the sort of, I don't know mythologies emerge around these communities and these kind of water-based communities.

It's funny I've just been looking into like lost forms of embodied knowledge and like what happens like in sort of what into what what kinds of industries or crafts or like what and like what does it mean to lose a sort of embodied knowledge in terms of a skill or something. And one of the big ones that they were talking about was ships. Yeah, like being obviously some people still do use sails or like make ships out of wood. But they were saying like, you know, when you're working with a crafts person or someone's like a master is teaching you their trade, there's usually like they'll be the line of like, you'll know it when it feels right, which is not something that like a book can teach you. And then they were talking about like, so what happens to like when I guess these practices of like, sailing, like using the stars as a form of navigation, having a really embodied knowledge of like, a relation to water and wind, and what happens like when those masters, let's say, like aren't around anymore, there's no one to learn these things off, do we lose that form of embodied knowledge in relation to water and wind? And I think there was something when you were just talking about this potential rise of a more island life, could there eventually be a potential return or I guess like a reinvention, potentially we’d have to relearn this for ourselves, or new form of embodied knowledge in relation to the water or the wind and whatever other resources, not resources, but I guess the elements.

I think what you're talking about as well, Nina, is sort of like the development of folk. Or folklore, like folk art in terms of like the boat building.

Yeah, there's something really interesting about the kind of like, I guess, for me, the kind of relationship between folk and like migration, because I think we typically consider folk to be this historical thing that really relates to like, I guess like a kind of indigenous presence. And in this work, I was kind of trying to marry this idea of like a deep knowledge and relationship to the land, but also one that welcomes people. And like, you know, especially thinking of like water. It's kind of inevitable for me that you think about immigration and like the kind of, you know, stop the boats being this prevailing rhetoric.

And I was kind of imagining that, you know, there's a kind of a question in the debate where the radio host asks Fatimah about, you know, their policy on immigration. And she says like, you know, we are like providing the service where we're also, you know, rescuing migrants because we live on boats. Like we are, we consider ourselves to be this kind of water people. And so we want to, you know, welcome people into this sort of borderless commune that we're kind of trying to build.

Something for me that I think you can see a bit more in the visual work that I made as part of this is the kind of like the way that I've illustrated people and the, you know, the things that are incorporated within that. I think it kind of starts to become, things start to become kind of like a life way or a custom. But but in a way that incorporates, I think, like a lot of the contemporary things that we have today.

So like in the drawing, there's like, you know, people are wearing like old hard drives as like necklaces, because like, presumably they carry the memory of their like, you know, parents or grandparents, but they're water damaged, so they don't, they just kind of hold like a symbolic presence. So I'm kind of interested, I guess, in, I mean, it doesn't really come through so much in the radio play, maybe a little bit in the second advert, which is like a sort of water cult idea that I'm kind of developing. But you know, it's kind of trying to imagine in this future, what are all of these strange, interesting, eccentric ways in which people will start to make new meaning of their relationships and their positionality and their kind of like identity through this very different landscape.

But I think also that the folklore you're talking about, it's emerging due to their conditions in terms of, it's not something that's specific to, oh, my ancestors were on this land. It's not related to that sort of like essentialism that I think can be attributed to certain varieties of folk, in terms of like all of your family must have come from this nation, otherwise, you are unable to practice this form of folk.

Or even that it will change and morph over time based on the people who continue to practice as well. You know, that it's something that is moving, is changing, is always growing. As you're saying, kind of if we have these forms of media and these forms of technologies that become kind of archival in a way, like we're not actually, we're not using them for their original intended purpose. You know, how would we, how would we use them in the future? You know, like I'm almost thinking about things like floppy disks from the late 90s. They're largely irrelevant now.

You know, how might those objects be picked up in the next 50 years when their use, their original use form becomes kind of devoid from the object itself. We understand that it's kind of a carrier of media, but we have no way in which to access it.

I'm wondering if that maybe slightly segues into this question that we've been thinking about in this mini-series in terms of folklore in the present, you know, how it changes. What kind of folk influenced the world of this work? And are there, like I'm thinking in particular of like these quite tongue-in-cheek advertisements that we have, like these water purification tablets, this kind of meditation that you're asking people to do, you know, as though they can sort of will away structural violence. Are there particular customs or cultures that impacted the dialogue of these characters and kind of, let's say the world that they inhabit?

I guess like even in the kind of way that the radio show speaks, and the kind of like language that he uses, there is kind of like a lot of water references, I guess. It's interesting, I think, with folk practices, because I think that like by and large, in this future world, people are kind of like, as I said, kind of like on this boundary between people who are like living on land and people who, you know, the Bitter River Collective, you have like a bit more of an aquatic way of living. And I think there's a point in it where she says, you know, like people join us and they learn to catch fish and, you know, they learn to like have the, you know, be part of this kind of community that we're building. And I think that we are like very deeply removed from the land in a lot of kind of contemporary, especially like city living often, you know, like everybody wants to be a villager, but nobody wants to live in a village kind of thing. And when I think of folk and I think of this idea of, you know, just being of the people and not being kind of institutionalized, not being put in like a glass box, but these practices which are largely about survival and about heritage and about kind of like, you know, just like living and being, I think that there's almost like this kind of dichotomy presented in the work perhaps, where there's this sort of bleak vision of the future where like people are encouraged to have these scary absurdist water purification tablets which have like lots of warning side affects and then this alternative which is being offered which is to return to land in a way. And I think it’s interesting because we’re talking about folk and these practices that get lost, but I think so many of them can come back from erasure once we do begin to physically practice being engaged with the land and growing things and understanding the environments around us and things like that.

Thank you so much, Sarah. We could have really spoken for another hour. There's many amazing people that have helped you voice this work.

Yeah, I would like to say a special thank you to my voice actors, Raza Tariq, ELLC, Yasmin Alrabiei, Ashirbad Roy and Rosemary Moss, as well as Sigrun Salmanian and Angelina Radakovic from the Mosaic Rooms.

Sarah, do you have anything that you want to make our listeners aware of, anything you have coming up or any other kind of events or showings that you'd like people to come to? Or also, if not, do you have any plans of where you're going to take this work, this sort of radio play, do you see it evolving in some sort of way or yeah?

Well, hopefully the kind of drawing associated with this work will be coming to London at some point, maybe this year. And for the radio play, honestly, now that I've got a taste for it, I am thinking of maybe like, should I make more episodes? Should I keep kind of expanding this world?

I think definitely you should. I mean, if you do decide to extend this series, you should definitely get in touch with us and we can either advertise it on the website, on your page, or yeah, or just keep the conversation going. So definitely, yeah.

We'd love to have you back.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Thanks Sarah, it's been great. Thank you for being part of this mini-series as part of the Henry Moore Institute's exhibition, Phantasmagoria Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age.

We have one more episode after Sarah's, which will be coming out in August. We look forward to having you back and we hope you enjoyed this episode. Bye.

Bye.

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