Get Back To Your Normal Life!

A multimedia lecture performance by Margareta Kern, 2025 - work in progress

Get Back to Your Normal Life! by Margareta Kern examines how militarism co-opts cinematic language to rehearse war, sustained by regimes of secrecy and the exploitation of migrant labour. Unfolding as a speculative lecture performance, the work weaves live montage with testimony, re-enactment and autofiction, to ask what performative possibilities emerge under conditions of silencing and control.

Drawing on Kern’s first-hand experience as a migrant role-player in a British Army mock village, where spray-painted containers simulate Afghanistan, Iraq and Bosnia, the work maps the recursive violence of this neo-colonial military imaginary. Migrant workers, often from the very regions being simulated, are hired as ‘authentic’ extras to re-enact trauma on ‘flexible’ minimum wage. And yet while the role-players are bound by secrecy the village is openly advertised as a commercial film location. Get Back to Your Normal Life! pulls at the seams of this extractive loop, not necessarily to reveal ‘secrets’ (though there might be some), but to interrogate the mechanisms that regulate what can be shown and said. Through precarious DIY staging apparatus and hybrid narration, the work probes at legality’s limit to explore what performative possibilities emerge under conditions of silencing and control. If a ‘mock village’ functions as a militarised film set, where fiction becomes operational, how might performance act as its subversive double?

The work's title – echoing the military's command terminating each round of role play – marks both an ending and an impossible return, underscoring how the violence of rehearsal lingers in the fiction of 'normal life’.

Get Back to Your Normal Life!  forms part of Kern's broader research into how militarism appropriates cinematic and theatrical methods - such as role-play, fictional scenarios, and film sets - not only to rehearse, but to actively produce warfare. See the related project Thursday War.

Selected for Seeding Space 2025, a talent development residency at London Performance Studios.

Currently in early development with support of London Performance Studios, Arts Council England and Southwark Council London.