Margareta Kern

Thursday War is a moving image and research project by Margareta Kern that captures the menace amid mundanity of naval exercises in Cornwall at a time of heightening military tensions. Filmed from the artist’s kitchen window over seven years, the circular images show the warships and submarines gliding along the horizon, their slow violence made palpable by the haunting soundtrack. This prescient and urgent work draws our attention to the role that simulation and coloniality play in perpetuating militarism and forever wars.

For the past seven 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 that the boundaries of real and simulated wars are not always clear, and that wars elsewhere have already been pre-enacted here.

At the same time, ‘here’ is situated quite clearly. Kern explores the way everyday militarism renders its violence imperceptible, through the geopolitics of living near the largest naval base in Western Europe: HMNB Devonport, Plymouth – a storage site for thirteen decommissioned nuclear submarines full of radioactive waste, and a base for the warships.

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.

I started filming naval exercises in 2015, soon after moving to Cornwall. As a person displaced by war, witnessing the war games from my home sits uneasy with me. This unease prompted many questions, such as why are these warships in my kitchen and how come you don’t see them?

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, the Thursday War project includes an expanded moving-image installation with a specially commissioned sound score developed in collaboration with a renown New York City-based cellist and composer Julia Kent and an award-winning Bosnian-born, German-based soprano Ljiljana Winkler. Supported by the Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice Grant 2023/2024.

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