Margareta Kern

Thursday War is a moving image research project by Margareta Kern that captures the menace amid mundanity of naval exercises in Cornwall, exposing the ocean’s often hidden infrastructure of surveillance and militarism.

Filmed from the artist’s kitchen window over eight years, the circular images show the warships and submarines gliding along the horizon, their slow violence made palpable by the haunting soundtrack devised in collaboration with the renown New York City-based cellist and composer Julia Kent, and with the artist's sister, award-winning Bosnian-born, German-based opera singer Ljiljana Winkler.

This is a prescient work, all the more urgent in this current moment of heightened geopolitical tensions, when we see no letting up in the rhetoric of conflict and militarism.

For the past eight years Kern has been filming the naval exercises from her home with a camera lens commonly used by the birdwatchers. Unlike the birdwatchers, Kern keeps the circle of the lens visible, evoking military images seen through the rifle’s viewfinder or a submarine’s periscope, recalling cinema’s own history of imbrication with war and violence [the first portable motion camera was made out of a revolving rifle able to ‘shoot’ twelve frames of birds in flight per second].

The resulting circular images show the warships and submarines gliding slowly along the horizon. There is a sense of threat in the air, a threat that remains unrealised, yet very present. It is not quite clear where the footage is taken, suggesting the boundaries of real and simulated wars are not always clear, and wars elsewhere have already been rehearsed here.

At the same time, ‘here’ is situated quite clearly. Kern explores how the everyday militarism renders its violence imperceptible through the geopolitics of living near a large naval base, HMNB Devonport, Plymouth, which is also the storage site for thirteen decommissioned nuclear submarines full of radioactive waste.

As a person displaced by war, witnessing war games from my home sat uneasy with me. I've also been taken aback by the almost imperceptible and unquestioned presence of military and war infrastructure in Cornwall, which prompted me to start filming.

I feel the work addresses urgent questions of everyday militarism, its (in)visibility, and Cornwall's role in these larger, global movements albeit from a local, even intimate perspective - it is filmed from my kitchen window.

A ‘Thursday War’ is the colloquial name given in the Royal Navy for the weekly war-fighting exercises that used to culminate on a Thursday. According to NATO, whose warships and submarines regularly take part in wargames off the coast of Cornwall, the forces are asked to respond to a fictitious scenario that resembles what might occur in real life.

Most recently, a ‘Thursday War’ scenario was revamped to include what the Royal Navy describes as “a new four fictitious nations with competing domestic and international ambitions requiring naval intervention under the banner of ‘Operation Mayflower’ (2023)’. For a critical decolonial reading of Mayflower and settler-centered mythology surrounding it to this day, please see Plymouth-based North Star Study Group: Mayflower Myths.

Currently in development, Thursday War project includes an expanded moving-image installation with a specially commissioned sound score developed in collaboration with the renown New York City-based cellist and composer Julia Kent and the award-winning Bosnian-born, German-based soprano Ljiljana Winkler. Supported by the Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice Grant 2024.

To follow the development of the project please join my mailing list or contact me to view an extract of the work.