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The Performativity of Clapping
HD video, 3 minutes, 2020
A video made during the 2020 UK Coronavirus lockdown about the 'Clap for Carers' events that took place every Thursday evening at 20:00 between 26 March and 28 May 2020. The video examines the performative qualities of clapping, asking why we clap for things, and what clapping does. What are the political effects of clapping for the NHS, a publicly funded health service, when years of funding cuts and privatisation have rendered it weakened and vulnerable to being overwhelmed by the Coronavirus pandemic? The video considers clapping as a way of silencing language and ending discussion that forcibly erases agonism by loudly constituting a single, unified community of clappers.
Made as part of ‘Lan Gwuhj Geimz’, the 2020 artist commission for Open School East.