Cropped photo of Anwar Ditta Defence campaign rally in Blackpool, 1980, with kind permission from Tandana [AD 30] www.tandana.org and Performance Shot. Encuentro Plymouth, Plymouth Arts Centre, 2007 © Ultra-red

We Come From Your Future is a sound investigation into the future of anti-racism in the UK. It asks how the public discourse on ethnic-otherness, diversity, and multiculturalism may contribute to the very conditions of racism? How has the erasure of terms like anti-racism, racist violence, and justice from the official bureaucratic language actually worked to both conceal and foment new convergences of racial tension? How has the composition and re-composition of migration in the UK contributed to new lines of anti-racist experience and opened up to new fields of struggle? What are the obstacles for a re-constitution of an anti-racist movement?

In a situation in which we have listened to the pronunciation of racism's end much too often, we are in need of a culture of communication and collaboration that would bridge existing gaps in connectivity and discussion. In our mind's eye racism shimmers loftily. It intersects with sexism, it blurs with exploitation. What is the reason for racism's astonishing resistance to critique?

We Come From Your Future starts today. It takes us to sites of current struggle that are not always aware of their historical antecedents; it listens to stories which we neither know nor seek to know in the present; it claims that those stories stem from a history that is embedded in our contemporary situation, and that belongs already to our experience. Realized through a combined method of field-based interviews and site-specific recordings the sound investigation will cohere in a performance with a formal protocol and a leading question.

We ask: ”What is the sound of anti-racism?”

Such a question explores the dynamic relationship between sound and political organising derived from our recent and ongoing involvement in anti-racist struggle in England's rural south west. It is from the experiences, questions and urgencies born of the emergent political practices in this region that we proceed.

Ultra-red