This text was written by Maddy Costa in response to Sheila Ghelani’s piece Softly/Tenderly, presented as part of Fierce Festival 2024. It is published on performingborders as part of our Live Art Writers Network with support from Fierce Festival.

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Click here to listen to the audio version of this article, read by author Maddy Costa

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Birmingham, October 2024. With swathes of the city a construction site, victim to the high-speed-to-nowhere folly of HS2, I barely notice the former factory being converted into apartments that I pass twice daily on my way to and from performances at Fierce Festival. Outside the building hangs a huge poster advertising – why read it? Luxury, spacious, blah blah blah. The same unaffordable, excluding redevelopments are happening everywhere. 

●●●

The building in which Softly/Tenderly takes place is also a former factory: built in 1899, it was originally used for the manufacture of bicycle parts, then bedsteads, pianos and (unsubstantiated, this) underwear, until a fire destroyed it in 2007. Redeveloped by Birmingham City University, the building is a factory again, but a modern iteration: STEAMhouse, a hub for innovation connecting students and businesses, artists and engineers. In such hi-tech surroundings, the tenderness of the space shaped by Sheila Ghelani for her audience feels almost incongruous. Soft chairs, warm drinks, smiles, slowness: these are not innovations but human fundamentals.

I should say now: I consider Sheila a friend, although a distant one, and we have been distant for months when I arrive at Softly/Tenderly, so there is immediate pleasure in the encounter. But pleasure, a care for sensuous enjoyment, for touch and beauty, is integral to this work, and how Sheila casts her audience as participants. Our task is simple: to mould a small copper disc into a curve so that it can hold a pin, transforming it into a brooch, a decorative piece. In guiding us through the actions, Sheila draws our attention inwards, to the softness of this metal, its burnish when heated with raw flame; and outwards, to copper’s role in the wider ecosystem, its importance to plants, which thrive and produce more seeds when copper is present in the soil. On the table with a nugget of rough-edged copper are cardoon seeds, fluffy as candy floss, one for each of us. We have magnifying glasses for close inspection, to marvel at how something so insubstantial can produce a plant so rugged and robust. 

Close and distant, near and far, everything is connected. The seeds to the bees that pollinate and transform nectar into wax, the wax we can use to polish our copper discs, the discs reshaped so they no longer look like coins.  

●●●

The hotel I’m staying in was also a factory once, making buttons. This is where I encounter the second part of Softly/Tenderly: a book in which Sheila describes the development of and research behind the work. The violence behind it. Everything is connected and human histories are as much entangled as severed by violence. Drawing on research by Professor Priya Satia, conversations with Satia and Dr Kate Nichols, site visits and more, Sheila untangles, makes plain, in stark print on white paper: 

Birmingham’s manufacturing industry was at the heart of Britain’s colonial project.

Manufacture and trade of guns enabled the trading and enslavement of humans.

Gun-making – this is Satia’s finding and argument – was collective and brought together different specialisms – specialisms that metal-workers could also apply to the making of decorative pieces, including brooches and buttons.

Buttons were used on military uniforms. You didn’t have to be making guns to be complicit in the colonial project.

Profits from the trade in guns and humans were invested in the transformation of England’s infrastructure: railways, canals, banks.

Those banks are still part of England’s infrastructure, absorbed into bigger banks, modern banks.

Later I check and yes: the modern bank named by Sheila in the book was fined $470m (£325m) for “abusive mortgage practices” in relation to the 2007-2008 financial crisis in which millions of people lost their homes. This modern bank did not need to take advantage of the UK government’s rescue package because the international group behind it was able – despite that fine – to inject £750m of capital into its UK arm.

Do take care, Sheila invites at the start of the book. This material is difficult, hard to absorb. I feel it in my chest, my throat: noxious, a pressure, choking.

●●● 

Irony is too insipid a word for the way violence and its correlative, death, is a principle for living. The violence of power, glorified on the street, the battlefield, the cinema and TV screen; the violence of the property developer cutting costs for increased profits, putting people at risk; the violence of police shutting down a protest, apprehending an innocent person, pressing a knee to a neck; the violence of world leaders who would be kings; the violence of the claim to royalty, claim to godliness, claim to supremacy, that shaped and shapes the modern world. 

This pervasive violence brings forth a violence from me as well. Some days my inner pendulum swings from abolition politics, mutual aid and transformative justice practices, to a conviction that Putin and Trump might as well just press the nuclear buttons now. Is this a soft thought, a tender thought? Only in so far as it emerges from a tenderised muscle (OK, the brain isn’t a muscle, but please let that slide) daily hammered by world news. To live engulfed by reports of genocide, border enforcement that results in the incarceration of children, rising costs and rising poverty, is to feel that hammer playing out a rhythm of malice. This rhythm as the music of time.

●●● 

As humans, surely we have other choices than violence, other possible ways of being. As with copper: use it to make a gun or a saucepan or a brooch? Each of these has different “value”, different uses, from nourishment to decoration, from gift to exploitation. 

As much as it is a meditation on guns and how human society has been shaped by them, Softly/Tenderly is also a series of invitations to think through the potential of human creativity, to imagine a future that rejects the obdurate cruelty threaded through history, the prioritisation of wealth over wellbeing so entrenched in how we live together. All metals, Sheila writes, become soft through human interaction: coaxing materials into new shapes. I soften my thoughts to see what might emerge:

● language

Did you know that the phrase “bullet point” was first used in the early 1980s? It doesn’t surprise me that it is coincident with Thatcherism/Reaganism, the development of neoliberal global capitalism in all its brutality. Please can we stop using this phrase, return to what I assume we used before: list? 

The phrase “take care” dates back much further, to the 1580s, a time of rampant English imperialism: the first English settlement on Turtle Island, the Roanoke Colony, was established in 1585. Take care: be careful – there was a lot to be careful of in these distant lands, a lot to face down through the barrel of a gun.

What are we saying when we invite each other to “take care”? Where or from whom is that care to be taken? Is it possible to wish people to “have care” instead? To invite them to “go softly”? Is the invitation to “take care” extracted from something longer: “go and take my care with you”? If yes, how can that be made more explicit? What commitment to giving care can be promised and delivered?

I’m asking these questions as I’ve asked them of myself for years. Unlike with the phrase “pay attention”, which I’ve successfully eradicated from my language, replaced by “give attention”, I haven’t come up with anything satisfactory.

●● land

Another of Satia’s findings and arguments that bore its way into Sheila is that, in Britain, gun ownership was tied to the protection of land and property. 

Land ownership that will have been claimed through a deliberate misinterpretation of religious teachings. Land claimed by a few who convinced themselves of their superiority, sanctified their claim to wealth and status through appeal to a spurious non-existent being, and stole from the many, stole from the earth itself. 

According to the research of Right to Roam, 50% of the land in England and Wales is owned by 1% of the population. Where land remains publicly accessible, it is often thanks to the refusal of local people to accept restriction or the recategorising of access as trespass. Those refusals don’t happen often enough because of what Nick Hayes, one of the originators of the Right to Roam campaign, identifies as: “an internalisation of the logic of exclusive private property. To cross a fence line, or climb a wall, seems like an immoral act because for centuries the exclusive rights of private property have been conflated with the notion of civil society, and anything that counters this is presented as tantamount to anarchic disorder.” [https://markavery.info/2020/08/17/guest-blog-right-to-roam-by-nick-hayes/]

The notion of “civil society” prevalent in the UK is a white supremacist one. It has been shaped and guarded not only by guns and religion but by art, by theatre: by the creation of plays [https://tomsix.substack.com/p/abolish-the-stage] that staged questions of honour, leadership, the divinity of kings, and later by tightening the rules of audience behaviour. [https://exeuntmagazine.com/features/relaxed-venues/]  

Discard civility: let’s be common. Commoners. Holding land, holding human needs, in common.  

●●● mudlarks

Since 2016, anyone who wants to scour the banks of the Thames for the flotsam of human history has had to apply for a permit. Permits are issued by the Port of London Authority, a self-financing public trust that acts as caretaker for some 95 miles of the river. I’ve had a permit since 2022 (it expires in 2025) and in that time have found almost everything made of metal – excepting the prize find, ancient coins – that a mudlark might. Dressmaking pins, bent by use; aiglets that once protected the ends of shoe- and corset-laces; all manner of nails, bolts, hooks; pieces of type, once used to print books or newspapers; fragments flaked from the side of a boat, painted cobalt blue; and a single button, which I’ve dated to the years 1785-1800 using diagrams of shank designs. 

Among the quotes from Priya Satia’s book Empire of Guns that Sheila weaves into Softly/Tenderly is the observation that, between 1688 and 1815, Britain was more or less always at war. Might the button have been from a military uniform? That bright blue boat: what was its work upon the sea? 

It’s a community along the riverbank, of devotees and obsessives: people who congregate to stare at the mud and sand, a form of meditation, until they spot something odd-shaped – or, more often, geometric in a way that suggests it’s shaped by human hands. Something from the everyday detritus of human existence, linking past with present, then and them with now and us. 

Civilisations rise and fall, power seized and lost, yet human life meanders on. In the days of the low spring tides, the UK government commits to raising the defence budget to just below £60 billion. This spending follows NATO guidelines: much of it goes to payment of armed forces, but there is also a shared agreement that “at least 20% of defence expenditure should be devoted to major new equipment”. The next generation of killing machines, keeping the trade in weaponry alive.

It’s hard to keep thoughts softened, keep creativity and imagination alive, when the undertow of violence is so strong. Sheila feels it; I feel it. I find a piece of printing press type embedded in the mud, and it connects to buttons, to the manufacture of guns; and guns connect to land ownership, to the crisis of unaffordable rent, and so to local councils bankrupt by, among other things, paying huge sums of money to landlords for what used to be social housing. 

The interconnected ways in which things are taken apart, Sheila writes. Her sadness rises, river mist, from the page.

●●● 

October 2024, my last day in Birmingham. Sheila’s words swimming in my head, I walk past the former factory being converted into apartments and look, actually look, at the poster that hangs across one whole side of the building. It features three men, grim-faced; one wears a blue apron; one looks wealthy; one brandishes a gun. The new complex is called The Gun Factory.

This is what compels me, always, towards art, performance: its capacity to expand my field of vision, drawing my attention to details I might otherwise miss. Its call to discovery, new thinking.

When Sheila invites me to write about Softly/Tenderly, it happens again. “You also have the Cyprus connection which works well with the use of copper in the piece,” she says, and I think: what? But there is so much I don’t know about the country in which both my parents were born, from which both were extracted as children. My dad laughs when I tell him I’ve been learning about copper in Cyprus: Kúpros, the Greek name for the island, gave its Roman invaders their word for cuprum, which eventually led to the English word copper. How have I never realised this?

Copper extraction began in around 4000BCE but had been dormant for centuries when Cyprus was absorbed into the ever expanding British Empire. In a history of Communism in Cyprus, Yiannos Katsourides writes that workers in the mines run by the British administration had no rights, no protections, no legislation to limit their working hours or ensure their care. The story my mum tells about her father is that he was a communist illegally redistributing grain, who had to be smuggled from the island in the final years before its independence. That the ship he was hidden in was bound for England, land of the oppressors, is a delicious plot twist, broad comedy. Fifteen years later I emerged a British national by birth certificate, with all the luck and opportunity this accident afforded me – but also the internal dissonance, the sense of always being a little bit wrong, a little bit out of place. 

The works Sheila has been coaxing into being, softly, tenderly, over the past decade, in their different ways enable her to explore her connection to England’s colonial project, her own accidents of birth and opportunity, her place in the sequence of violence, cruel advantage, inequality. After watching Common Salt, her collaboration with Sue Palmer, I thought about enclosure, partition, how Pakistan was severed from India, northern Cyprus from southern Cyprus, by nothing more substantial than a line across a map. I wondered what it would take to erase the legacies of colonialism, dissolve them, not the way salt dissolves in water so that you can taste it still, a sting on the tongue, but the way water dissolves into steam, into air, dissipates, disappears.

●●● 

A sting on my tongue: a recognition of how I’ve internalised the logic of colonialism. What values and judgements are embedded in my avowal of luck and opportunity in being born here rather than there? What gentrification of the mind (thank you, Sarah Schulman, for this ever-provoking phrase) convinces me that my life is better here than it might have been elsewhere? To me the privilege of growing up in a land characterised by railways, canals and banks is plain, and yet others whose families have been English for generations don’t see this privilege, don’t connect it to the former enslavement of humans, the trade in guns, the extraction of resources from colonies. These thoughts are not as steam but ice, painful to touch. 

In the arid landscape of Cyprus, the rivers now mostly run dry. I wonder what the impact has been of extracting that amount of copper from the ground. What the impact will be of the new golf course being constructed. Tourists never know of the water shortages, because the hotel taps are never turned off.

●●● 

I write this in March 2025, a few days after a fatal shooting in a street very close to my house in Stockwell, south London. A boy, Lathanial Burrell, aged sixteen, the same age as my son. I’ve lived in this house for nineteen years and can measure out those years in news reports of gun violence in nearby streets. Each news report an individual, a family, a friendship group, grief. 2011: the year of riots across London following the shooting of Mark Duggan by police in Tottenham, but also the year that Thusha Kamaleswaran, a girl of five, was shot on Stockwell Road while standing in a chip shop, caught in crossfire between teenagers, trapped in an accident of time and place. 

Since 2020 I’ve been part of a mutual aid group in Lambeth [https://www.lambethmutualaid.com/]; among the things we do is organise a free cafe once a month in Brixton. At the cafe that takes place five days after Lathanial dies, I meet a woman who works with children and knew him when he was younger. The problem is, she tells me, whether or not you’re in a gang, you’re still a target. 

As humans, I write, surely we have other choices than violence, other possible ways of being. No question mark because this is fact, we have and we do. Don’t we? Isn’t it also a fact that that choice is too often an accident of luck, privilege, opportunity afforded to some but not others? I find this thought painful to sit with.

I tell my mum there’s a book I want to read, about communists in Cyprus. Oh, they were terrible, she tells me. Violent towards their own. Her mum’s brother was a member of the Communist Party, and he was shot by them. Until connecting outwards from Softly/Tenderly, I hadn’t known he’d existed.

●●● 

The making of guns was a collective endeavour and it is a choice, a particular one, that Sheila makes for Softly/Tenderly to be a work of communal participation. We watch each other heat our discs of copper, gasping and cooing as the metal flares red, hisses cool in water. Side by side we shape our copper, coaxing it into soft curves, the shape of a cupped palm. Remember, Sheila invites us, being together, making. Remember, because the violence that surrounds us would have us forget.

Further reading – in addition to links embedded in text

Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Penguin Press) by Priya Satia

The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines That Divide Us (Bloomsbury) by Nick Hayes. You can join the campaign for greater land access at https://www.righttoroam.org.uk/

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land and How to Take It Back (William Collins) by Guy Shrubsole

The History of the Communist Party in Cyprus: Colonialism, Class and the Cypriot Left (Bloomsbury) by Yiannos Katsourides

The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (University of California Press) by Sarah Schulman

Common Salt (Live Art Development Agency) by Sheila Ghelani and Sue Palmer

Biographies:

Maddy Costa works as a writer, dramaturg, critical friend, conversation facilitator, zine-maker and more. She is co-author with Andy Field of Performance in an Age of Precarity (Methuen, 2021), and collaborates with writers/artists Mary Paterson and Diana Damian Martin on Something Other, an online/IRL community for awkward writing practices. As a dramaturg she has worked with artists including Paula Varjack (iMelania, #thebabyquestion) and Selina Thompson (salt, Twine), and as a board member for the dramaturgs’ network she organises peer support gatherings. She co-hosts a pop-up theatre club – like a book group, but for performance – at Cambridge Junction, and theatres across London.

Sheila Ghelani is an artist of Indian-English mixed heritage, whose solo and collaborative performances, social art works, installations, texts and videos seek to illuminate and make visible the connections between identity, ecology, science, history and the present day. Since 1995 her attentive, detailed and care ‘full’ practice has been cross-pollinating ideas, materials, people and places in order to unsettle dominant narratives and make space for those that are (or for that which is) in-between, on the edge, in the middle, at the border. Sheila has made and shown work at venues and festivals including Belluard Bollwerk International in Switzerland, Trouble Festival in Brussels, Performance Space in Sydney, Heart of Glass in St Helens and Wellcome Collection in London. Recent work includes making and sharing A Restorative at Brighton Festival (2023, commissioned by The Spire); presenting Common Salt (2018-now) with artist Sue Palmer in museums, libraries and arts spaces around the UK as part of the ongoing series Rambles with Nature; as well as developing new work Atmospheric Forces (also with Sue) and On Rock & Air, a new participatory artwork. @sheilaghelani

Credits: 

Photos of Softly/Tenderly at STEAMhouse by Manuel Vason at Fierce Festival 2024 

Softly/Tenderly was supported by Arts Council England and commissioned by Fierce and performance, possession + automaton, a three-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)