I’ve always just tried to do what needs doing.
Betty Tebbs

The first performance of this work, a sonic essay about the life of Betty Tebbs, was broadcast live on Glasgow-based art radio station Radiophrenia in November 2017. Tebbs, an English activist who died in 2017 at 98, was a socialist, feminist and self-declared revolutionary. Her life was spent agitating for political change, including as a trade unionist and anti-imperialist peace campaigner.

Tebbs’ unpublished memoir and interviews are the starting point for this project, that incorporates readings, archival recordings and field recordings. The work looks to Tebbs’ story to consider how political subjects are formed, and how the political horizons of the present are shaped by encounters with the histories of collective struggle.

A new iteration of the ongoing project was presented in residency at Titanik Gallery, Turku, Finland, in 2019. The work was reconfigured for live sound diffusion across the gallery space. It was shaped by developing ideas around life-writing as political praxis, and how sound and performance might draw out the affective and embodied aspects of political experience.