Unjust Deaths Installation
Part of INQUEST Artist Residency 2025
The Unjust Deaths 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.
TEAM
Curator & 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.
Developed in close collaboration with INQUEST’s Family Reference Group, Memorialisation Working Group, Archive Research Volunteers and staff.
Produced by BÉZNĂ Theatre
Installation Open December 2025
Supported by INQUEST.
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.