Nobody But Us

Margareta Kern and Susan Kelly

Nobody But Us is a collaborative research project between Margareta Kern and Susan Kelly that critically examines how psychological techniques developed under British colonial counterinsurgency – particularly the 'soft' tactics of "hearts and minds" campaigns – resurface in contemporary governance. Through archival research and visual analysis, the project traces continuities from colonial "rehabilitation" programs in Kenya, where techniques were used to 'cleanse' and reconstitute compliant colonial subjects, to the UK's neoliberal policies of predictive policing, counter-terror campaigns and corporate surveillance capitalism. By assembling instructional diagrams, colonial archives, and contemporary documents, the project probes at how psychological discourses often provide cover for violent practices of subjugation, control, and extraction. Operating as both, artistic research and critical intervention, the project extends investigation into how power operates through visual training systems and image regimes.

How can we see the subtle techniques through which subjects are governed, made and re-made today? How are ‘technologies of the visual’ imbricated in these processes of subject-making and persuasion?

The project repurposes the "Nobody But Us" phrase used by the NSA - referring to security vulnerabilities only they can exploit, while evoking an image of an exclusive collectivity - to critique systems that segment societies into controllable groups. Initiated during Kern's 2019 Birkbeck School of Law residency, NOBUS combines academic writing with performative practice to intervene in the complex knot of processes that are today producing a society increasingly driven by protectionist, segmented and fascistic formations, and controlled by techniques of counterinsurgency.

Kelly and Kern are currently developing an expanded essayist lecture performance, alongside an accompanying academic text due in 2025 - 2026.

See the related text ‘Dream State: Hugs, Dreams, and British Psychopolitics’, Margareta Kern, 2020 - published by the Harun Farocki Institute and Journal of Visual Culture.

Image above: The Megascope, Fig. 24, in A. E. Dolbear: The Art of Projecting. A Manual of Experimentation in Physics, Chemistry, and Natural History with the Porte Lumière and Magic Lantern, 1877.

Image above/below: Susan Kelly and Margareta Kern, Nobody But Us, slides from the lecture, 2019

Initial development of the project supported by the Arts Council England and Birkbeck School of Law.