We are No Man’s Land, a community dedicated to questioning the construct, culture, and material of the unstable mixed heritage experience. We rally to establish greater transparency, safer spaces and a more supportive community for those obliged to disclaim their identities through a lens of social assumption, colourism, exile and Anglonormativity. For those ‘othered’ in straddling multiple mixed, queer, immigrant, healing worlds.
We are mixed. East and West. Both/and, and neither/nor. Belonging to brownness and whiteness. A chasm. The impure “Briton”. The migrant. In a no man’s land of cultural and familial loss.
Our conversation is ongoing. We aim to amplify dialogue and create awareness around the perplexities of being mixed heritage with lived experience at the heart of all we do. Where is our territory? Where is our locatedness? Where is our agency to speak about a culture we are told we only have partial access to? We destabilise dirty words like “miscegenation” and “half-caste” by bringing to the surface our brown-white stories of intimacy, trauma, entanglement, family, and love.
Through staging exhibitions, performances, social events and workshops, we speak out and interrogate with our creative programmes what it is truly like to exist in illegible spaces known to us as the in/between.
With this building community we represent as many people from the ‘mixed’ sphere as possible. All our stories are unique, individual and valued; there is something that connects us all. We work collaboratively and without hierarchy so all our voices can be heard.
We welcome all to come together to heal, to grieve, to celebrate, to share stories, resources, learn from and uplift each other. The most important thing to us is supporting a space where we can all feel safe.
This is the House that Jack Built (2022) - Multimedia installation
Positionality. Love. Loss. Lament for our Terra Brittania.
Sanghara and Organ perform through the voices of their community ‘No Man’s Land’ to construct a live archival interrogation of what Britain means to the mixed heritage experience. Instances of anger, resentment and love are played out as cinematic mimicry and reconstructions of brownness and whiteness.
The English folk tale ‘The House that Jack Built’ is reimagined through repeated lyrics, artefacts and Guy Hamilton’s ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’, all to be dismantled and rebuilt as examples that complicate the imaging and codification of mixed identities throughout history. New possibilities for seeing and understanding are opened to question how bodies can be remixed, speech dissolved and personas assumed as the artists form representative rifts, inserting themselves into the narrated scenes. Characterisation here is self-defence, is disorder.
Provided with torches, the audience are invited to infiltrate the work, searching through material to decode hidden narratives, perhaps as a way to overwrite and draw attention to the artifice of knowledge-construction.
If Britain is the House and Jack its proprietor, we must ask how we can tear down and mend its walls, restructuring the frameworks of institutions that keep us below the threshold of being heard.