Onyeka Igwe, the Artist Exploring England’s Social Histories

speaks to artists working across performance and film about the role of storytelling in their practices, and about creating work that allows us to come together in a world that tries its very best to keep us apart.’s practice is, in her own words, animated by the question: “How do we live together?” For this reason, she was the first artist who sprang to mind when developing this series of conversations.

Did I always remember these events in a hazy way, as if it was a local phenomenon that seeped into my memory, or did I learn about it later and then think it was something I experienced at the time? In the 2020 lockdown I was walking and cycling around Hackney Marshes, the Lee Valley area and the Greenway cycle routes and a lot of childhood memories resurfaced alongside a kind of nostalgia that concerned me – a romantic remembering of things I experienced or wish I’d experienced.

OI: Oof, Englishness is something I always remember feeling estranged from, something when I was a child I was fearful of enunciating. I don’t think I ever have called myself, or been called English without incident. It’s not something I have felt able to or desired to ascribe to myself. In that very clichéd London way, I am a very happy, comfortable and confident Londoner – that’s a description I can occupy, but of course I have been socialised in English culture.

I primarily experienced this in myself, and I wanted to convey mobility as an expression of memory and selfhood – that all the voices and the non-place or multiple places of the commons are represented visually in the film.

OI: I am conflicted about the importance of archives in my practice. For the last few years I was making work primarily around British colonial archives and my last film,, was in some way a repudiation of my reverence for the archive. I was hoping to unlearn it and I honestly thought I was done with it. But for this, I couldn’t resist visiting a local museum and looking through loads of documents, images and clippings about these historical protests to accompany my memory of them.

OI: The thing that gets me or excites me most about these protests is the community that was created around the protesting. People squatted [in] houses that were scheduled for demolition across Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead for around a year and they lived there together, establishing a way of living outside of the norm. No cars, street parties, collective living. The possibility of living out the life you desire, now, I think is powerful.

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