No one has clean hands; there are no innocents and no onlookers. We all have dirty hands; we are all soiling them in the swamps of our country and in the terrifying emp­tiness of our brains. Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor.

– Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (tr. Constance Farrington, 1983)

I smell bacon, I smell grease,
I smell London Met Police!

– Protest chant

I frequently wonder at glossy diaspora culture that calls itself revolutionary: omg wow you’re so brave, this vulture-like sensory experience x normalising ~*commuuuuuuunity*~ supper club x screening of normaliser film with donations going to ~*communityyyyyyyyy*~ will fix everything. Who is it for? What is the point? Obviously some people are content to frame genocide as a humanitarian crisis to be assuaged with donations, not a shared cause for liberation. If that’s solidarity, keep it.

My friend Aislinn recently did me a great kindness by pointing out I was simply depressing myself by keeping up with mainstream ESEA cultural production. While it can be useful to provide an overview for fellow ESEAs who don’t want to slog through mediocre art, writing and cultural events, recently I’ve just felt grumpy rather than insightful. So I knew I had to listen when Aislinn told me about A Thousand Fires, a film about a Burmese family working in an oilfield by Saeed Taji Farouky, a Palestinian-Egyptian-British artist/filmmaker & educator. Because I was so engaged with genuinely interesting and experimental ESEA art on this year’s Queer East critics scheme, I didn’t have capacity to see Farouky’s project, The Land of Common Disgrace, at Open City Docs. This collective work combined radical architecture with theatre, performance and filmmaking to re-create and subvert each participant-actor’s experience of state repression for pro-Palestinian activism. 

***

Reading about Farouky’s project made me think of a theatre piece from earlier this year with a similar interest in subverting the visuality of protest and state power. In March, I went to see THE PIGS ARE COMING, a work-in-progress by Tasnim Siddiqa Amin, a working class Bangladeshi-British Muslim theatremaker, performer, and writer. I walked into her work with the feeling that I, a wretched audience member, had interrupted something, as the black box space at Camden People’s Theatre is arranged so the entrance directly opens onto stage right. While we were filing into our seats, Tasnim herself was rolling about, smiling, oinking, and covering their face and hands in a reddish muddy substance from a small tub—maybe wet terracotta clay. I also noted a keffiyeh draped over some chairs and a small desk with a tech person in the far corner, and wondered how these elements would be activated.

Through a parody of Old Macdonald Had A Farm, Tasnim explained what they meant by “pig”: 

“With an oink oink here and an oink oink there, till there isn’t an oink no more coz the pigs we love to eat like bacon, sausage and pork loin.
Eya eya oh. The pigs we love unless you’re—
—Muslim. Or Black. Or trans. Or poor. The pigs don’t love us much. [Sad face].”

THE PIGS ARE COMING used participatory theatre, spoken word, movement, and projected footage to discuss state violence. This last is realised as the figure of a pig; as shown from the very beginning of Tasnim’s piece, there’s the uncomfortable possibility that you, too, can become a pig. I felt most people who came to see already knew about this possibility. Sometimes you just get a sense you’re among comrades. There was a significant global majority in the audience, which is rare for theatre.

Tasnim clarified their participatory idea: to process her trauma from being arrested at a protest for resisting the british state kidnapping and warehousing our migrant neighbours. She cheerfully dismissed the idea that she should take this trauma to the professionals: we, the audience, could process this with them. They requested that we close our eyes to give everyone else privacy as we responded to her two questions: to raise our hand if we had been arrested, or if we knew a loved one who had been arrested. I felt the quiet shuffling of people responding to both questions; for some reason I was fighting back tears when I raised my own hand. I heard something shift in Tasnim’s voice each time she thanked us for sharing. It’s a reality for so many of us that we and or our loved ones have faced violent state repression, so of course we’d come into a space and try to process it together.

It was such an intense experience that I’m probably remembering things incorrectly or out of order. I do clearly recall Tasnim inviting some audience members to paint 4 protest signs, which everybody set about with a concentration that I found really touching to watch. They dutifully held up their finished handiwork:

THE PIGS ARE COMING

These signs were propped against the back wall, as if watching, guarding, and describing what was happening in front of them.

What I also experienced most vividly was the repeated imaging of Tasnim’s violent arrest. The footage of her arrest was projected onto the back wall, and it was excruciating to see how this film captured not only how she was bodily dragged away by police officers, but how many other phone cameras were out at the time. It was a film about being filmed, how state violence is imaged and how we consume that image. It was a struggle for me to stay present because I kept thinking how we should be practicing different de-arrest techniques so this can never happen to our comrades before being disgusted with myself for reducing this to a situation that could have been optimised. I was angry with the pigs while hating the feeling of my own complicity. 

But there was also the knowledge that there’s still some people who’ve never ever had to watch a video of state violence while knowing it’s their loved ones being killed or injured or captured. Some people open their phones and have never felt like their soul is ripping its way out of their own throat because none of what’s happening right now is relevant to how they live their lives. They have never felt their own blood beat a tattoo of rage, fear, and pride for comrades. 

Tasnim re-enacted their arrest, throwing herself around the floor as the tech person tracked her movements with a phone camera mounted on a small plastic arm. It was incredibly uncomfortable to hear and watch them struggle as someone was bent over and only focused on getting the shot, capturing extreme close-ups that were projected onto the back wall. This excess of technology and images made the black box setting feel cold and cell-like. It showed the isolation of being physically close to other people but they can’t—or won’t—help you.

THE PIGS ARE COMING ended with Tasnim sitting on the floor, surrounded by pans of stage makeup as they painted their face an awful pink before pulling a rubber mask on top of everything, standing up and staring calmly at us through the eyeholes, breathing, just breathing. This called back to the opening of the work, where Tasnim was on all fours taking a clay bath while making animal noises. We closed out with Tasnim stood upright, costumed and painted as a human pig, calm and disquieting.

Each time I’ve talked about THE PIGS ARE COMING to comrades who have experienced state violence, they’ve expressed something like relief that art like this could exist. In addition to the physical and financial toll of incarceration and bureaucratic interaction with the criminal legal system, it’s often the psychological aspect of repression that really gets you. Being made to wait, the suspension, anticipation, the feeling of your future being foreclosed, of distance between you and others as they pull away at your most vulnerable. You take that feeling to the grave unless you find a way of sharing that burden. 

Because of how the criminal legal system captures people’s time and energy through drawn-out proceedings, Tasnim has had to fundraise to cover their basic costs. Their personal fundraiser is still open to donations here. Tasnim and her comrades from the Peckham protest will need funds for their legal fight for the foreseeable future, which you can support here.

***

I think it’s fair to wonder at the use of art and therefore cultural workers right now. Art seems frivolous, wet, inadequate—but that’s often because some workers think it worthy of their time to render consumable simulations of violence as something that Happens To Them Lot Over There for a western audience that desires to be shocked and morally educated but otherwise live untouched. The status quo of this complicit world is maintained. And yet projects such as the Gaza Biennale demand our presence for ‘a practice, a commitment, an education, a reckoning.’ Importantly, the organisers instruct that attendees refrain from burdening Gazan artists with their emotions, and I think with shame the number of times I’ve seen Gazans take on that burden of reassuring western audiences not to lose hope about a genocide that is our responsibility to stop. There is a workshop on 17 August 2025 at The People’s Letters with livestreamed talks and workshops from artists in Gaza and you can get pay what you can tickets here. 

Art that demands more from attendees, that gets us to account for our own feelings and reckon with our own complicity from a place of activation rather than self-pity, is necessary in this political moment. We should look clearly at what art is being asked to do right now, not only in the content of the artworks, but where it takes place and how those spaces are run. Under this colonial capitalist system, art is an asset to be protected and the art space itself is a place that maintains class difference. To mangle Bordieu, cultural institutions are where the transfer of cultural capital takes place over time; this process requires securitisation to ensure the protection of its material worth and perpetuation of symbolic capital. In other words, pigs get called on you right quick because management is scared that respectable pro-genocide middle class people won’t come to the art gallery anymore if you organise to wrest back time and space for the cause of liberation.

Let us hope that these art spaces remain accountable to their communities, that there are more and more disruptions, occupations, and actions, and that all zionists, careerists, and their pig-protectors roast down in hell.