Reading International #19: An Apprenticeship In Queer I Believe It Was – by Nina Wakeford

Clausen, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6536-6236 (2019) Reading International #19: An Apprenticeship In Queer I Believe It Was – by Nina Wakeford. [Performance]

Abstract/Summary

27 April 2019 Greenham Common Control Tower, Newbury Nina Wakeford performs her film and spoken word work in a unique event at the Control Tower at Greenham Common. Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was active from 1981 to 2000 and was established by women to protest nuclear weapons being sited near Reading at RAF Greenham Common. The work explores the capacity of the women’s peace camp to transform the identity of those who lived there. It includes thousands of images of forget-me-nots from the nearby memorial Peace Garden, photographed one by one on 16mm film. The performance combines this footage with words from first-person accounts of women who were interviewed in a study of the peace camp, alongside archival documents, and a song. Re-performed in the Control Tower and relayed to the audience below, the flowers and the words of the women are broadcast across the landscape where previously the women themselves were surveyed. (Un)Commoning Voices & (Non)Communal Bodies curated by Maayan Sheleff and Sarah Spies