Preventable Installation
Part of INQUEST Artist Residency 2025
A walk-through installation on state-related deaths created by Sînziana Cojocărescu (BÈZNĂ Theatre) in response to the INQUEST archive.
Presented as part of the INQUEST Artist Residency: Unjust Deaths project funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Tuesday 9 December - Wednesday 17 December 2025
SCRUM Studios Warehouse, 191 Talgarth Road, Hammersmith, London, W6 8BJ
10am - 6pm Monday - Saturday
FREE ENTRY
Bring a flower for remembrance.
Step inside a warehouse transformed into a living archive. This immersive, walk-through installation traces the history of state-related deaths — stories of loss, resistance, and the long pursuit of justice.
The space invites touch, listening, and reflection. As you move through layers of case files, images, and testimony, you encounter fragments of lives cut short and the echoes that remain.
At its centre lies a shared gesture of mourning — a work that continues to grow with every visitor who enters. Preventable is a living record, built from grief, love, and the demand for justice.
Visitors are encouraged to allow 30 minutes to 1 hour to experience the installation and to give themselves space to grieve, reflect, and respond. If you wish, you may bring a flower or a bouquet to contribute to the artwork.
About the Installation
Preventable is the result of a three-month residency honouring those who have died as a result of state violence in Britain and amplifying the legacy of resistance led by bereaved families. Rooted in testimony, archival material, and community engagement, the work has been developed in close collaboration with INQUEST’s Family Reference Group, Memorialisation Working Group, Archive Research Volunteers, and staff.
The installation invites audiences to engage physically, emotionally, and politically with stories of state neglect, grief, and protest.
More events to be announced.
About BÉZNĂ Theatre:
BÈZNĂ Theatre is an award-winning British-Romanian theatre collective that creates radical, visually striking theatre, encourages grassroots activism and exposes and resists institutionalised and normalised violences. Formed in Lincolnshire in 2013 and working on the frontline of Romanian and British political theatre and activism ever since, BÈZNĂ reclaims the theatre as an intersectional space of resistance, igniting dissent and empowering communities to speak back.
Installation Team:
Artist: Sînziana Cojocărescu is a London-based Romanian writer, director, and Artistic Director of BÉZNĂ Theatre. She leads interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of performance, research, field-work, and activism, focusing on colonialism, state crime, migration, and the arms trade.
Producer: Claire Gilbert is an international theatre producer based in Essex. She has worked on projects in India, USA, Czechia, Romania, Germany and Portugal as well as across the UK and co-runs BÉZNĂ Theatre.
Special thanks: INQUEST staff, INQUEST’s Family Reference Group, Memorialisation Working Group, Archive Research Volunteers, Bishopsgate Institute, SCRUM Studios, Garden Court Chambers.
About INQUEST:
BÈZNĂ Theatre’s residency is part of our Unjust Deaths project that focuses on unlocking INQUEST’s archive and exploring ideas of memorialisation in response to state related deaths. Through this National Heritage Lottery Funded project, we seek to understand, document and circulate the ways that people resist, remember and create legacies for their families and friends who have died in state-related deaths.
The Preventable Installation is the result of a three-month residency to co-create a multimedia, walk-through installation that honours those who have died due to state violence in the UK and amplifies the legacy of resistance led by bereaved families. Rooted in testimony, archival material and community engagement, the work will be developed in close collaboration with INQUEST’s Family Reference Group, Memorialisation Working Group, Archive Research Volunteers and staff. The installation will invite audiences to engage physically, emotionally and politically with stories of state neglect, grief and protest, using video, voice, and participatory methods.
Community workshops
TEAM
Artist & Workshop Facilitator: Sînziana Cojocărescu
Produced by Claire Gilbert
We designed and delivered three workshops for bereaved family members, working closely and sensitively to ensure each encounter is on their terms. We have allocated part of the project fee to ensure that all participants are paid at or above the Living Wage for their time and testimony, in line with the ethics of our practice. These workshops invite participants to co-create material, reflect on their own experiences of grief and resistance, and feed into the final installation in form or process.
Workshops:
Exploring the Silence (Focus Group & Discussion) Monday 13 October 2025:
What do you feel is missing from how state-related deaths are talked about in the media, the legal system, or the public record? This workshop is a facilitated conversation, a space for collective reflection on what has been erased, overlooked, or distorted in the public narrative. We’ll explore specific cases if participants wish, share frustrations, and think about how these gaps can become part of a call to action within the final installation. Participant insights will help shape the artwork and make sure it reflects what matters most to those directly affected. Duration: 1 and a half hours.
Visual Collage: Memory and Montage: Friday 17th October 2025
In this hands-on workshop, we’ll use visual montage techniques to create collages that speak back to loss, injustice and resistance. Participants can bring your own photographs and personal documents. We’ll have a scanner and printer on site so nothing gets damaged, and they can combined them with text, headlines and archival material. This is a quiet, creative space to reflect, make and reimagine what has been erased or ignored. Duration: 1 and a half hours.
Voice & Storytelling: Saturday 18th October 2025
Your voice matters. In this oral storytelling workshop, participants are supported to write and record a short story, message, memory or tribute in their own words, whether speaking from personal experience or sharing something symbolic. The recording can be included in the final installation anonymously, voices can be altered, or kept private. Duration: 2 hours.
The installation will unfold as a layered, immersive experience composed of fragmented testimony, archival visuals, soundscapes, and spatial choreography. Visitors will move through the work guided not by narrative but by emotional logic and the echoes of loss, protest, and survival. The interviews will be carefully interwoven with archival materials accessed through Bishopsgate Institute, layering personal testimony with state-produced documents, media reports and public records. The final work will be a multimedia installation combining projection, voice, soundscape and text, offering a deeply affecting journey through memory, violence and collective resistance. Testimonies may be fragmented, echoed or visually abstracted, inviting audiences to sit with contradiction, grief and the politics of remembrance.
At the end of the installation, audience members will be invited to respond: to leave behind a word, a thought, a question, or a memory of someone they’ve lost to a system. These responses will be gathered into a growing, co-authored text - part archive, part lament, part demand - which could be an online legacy document for the residency, or be displayed as part of the installation itself.
We are drawing from our experience of delivering workshops for food bank users as part of a community project (FULL, 2024), our ongoing devising project with Palestinian women (QUA, 2024), our acting through movement laboratory for non-actors with lived experience of refuge (Confluence, 2024) and political theatre workshops delivered throughout our company’s existence.
Workshops designed and facilitated by Sînziana Cojocărescu.