Home To Roost: Imagining The Present with Jeremiah Day
5 April 2025 4–6pm
Presented by This is Arcade CIC, 'Home to Roost' is an experimental public gathering that blends town-hall discussion, performance, and participatory workshop. With US artist Jeremiah Day, we’ll create space for collective reflection on urgent crises — disability benefit cuts, cost-of-living, climate, youth violence, wars, crisis of democracy, transforming them into embodied responses; in a way that moves beyond passive consumption of news and towards active meaning-making as a precondition for civic life.
"The recent cataclysm of events, tumbling over one another, whose sweeping force leaves everybody, spectators who try to reflect on it and actors who try to slow it down, equally numbed and paralyzed…"
-Hannah Arendt, Home To Roost
The project takes inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s 1975 text, 'Home to Roost', in which she argued that politics begins with the act of facing difficult facts. In the current climate of dramatic events —where events unfold at overwhelming speed, making it difficult to process their impact—Home to Roost challenges this inertia by modeling new methods of engagement.
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Jeremiah Day If It’s For The People, It Needs To Be Beautiful, She Said, Exhibition and live program Badisches Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, 2020. Detail: Bad Reading Group, mapping and connecting individual aggregate states, 3rd day of workshop inside the exhibition, concept & scenography by Diane Hillebrand. Photo: Severin Geißler.
The event will unfold in three structured but dynamic phases:
Collective Workshop: After a short introduction to the Arendt text, participants will be invited to name pressing issues they believe must be confronted, creating a shared map of concerns. Some of these will be contradictory, and perhaps there will even be discussions about what are facts and what is allegation (debates about the pandemic come to mind), but a space will be held for all, and moving through efficiently we will make a kind of shared landscape of focus. The discussion will be moderated to keep things open and plural, not to force any agenda.
Text Introduction & Discussion: A deeper look into Arendt’s ideas will provide a theoretical lens for processing these issues.
Improvised Performance & Embodied Response: Through improvised sketches and performative responses, participants will translate these themes into collective, embodied expressions. US artist Jeremiah Day will facilitate and lead this phase, responding to themes raised by the group, drawing upon his practice of teaching performance and pedagogy.Happening in SE15, this gathering will serve as a live experiment in testing how public engagement can shift from passive spectators to active stake-holders . Rather than merely discussing issues, participants will work together to reinterpret and reimagine them through performance, creating a visceral and participatory form of civic dialogue.
This is a pilot project, if successful, could evolve into a recurring public practice within the programme of This is Arcade CIC, offering a new, community-driven model for political reflection and action. By embedding this work within the CIC’s structure, Arcade aim to create a sustainable, scalable approach to civic engagement that can be adapted to different communities and contexts.
Arcade and Flat Time House previously partnered to present Jeremiah Day What Is Power? 3 June–9 July 2023
Jeremiah Day’s work – through photography, performance, text and installation – represents a consistent investigation into art’s capacity for the civic, one materialised through subjective traces and a personal narrative style that grounds political thinking in tender experience. From 2014–2019, Day focused almost exclusively on live performance, producing a series of slide-show performances, often with musician Bart de Kroon, combining improvised movement and text with documentary investigations into military bases, anti-war organising efforts, historic and contemporary town-meeting forms. Day’s recent work focuses on structures of group improvisation in which political themes are explored through forms of production which themselves propose models of working and struggling together.