About

My practice-based archival research will look at the Strangeways Prison protest of 1990. The subsequent occupation lasted for 25 days, involved 300 men and was widely covered by the media. Prisoners scaled the roof and communicated their mistreatment by the prison system to the media with messages on blackboards. This research project will examine the act of attempting to speak freely in an environment where one does not have the freedom to do so, taking the prison as a place of non-representation where self-determination is extinguished. I will revisit the initial protest, an under-investigated event in the most significant prison riot in British penal history and employ experimental filmmaking to reconsider what happened that day.