Margareta Kern

Thursday War is an ongoing project by Margareta Kern that uses film and performance to trace how militarism scripts violence into everyday life, focusing on the relentless presence of naval exercises off the coast of Cornwall.

Filmed over eight years from my kitchen window, the work captures the warships, submarines, and aircraft involved in the British Royal Navy’s so-called “Thursday War” – weekly training exercises staged from HMNB Devonport, the UK’s largest naval base. Using a birdwatching lens, I frame these exercises through circular, grainy, in-camera images that evoke telescopic surveillance and submarine periscope, and also reference cinema’s entanglement with histories of war production that bind optics to ballistics – the first portable picture camera was adapted from a revolving rifle, the Fusil Photographique (1882), designed to ‘shoot’ twelve frames per second of a bird in flight.

In Thursday War footage, submarines and warships drift across the horizon, making visible the slow choreography of war rehearsals that often blend into the background of daily life – their mundane repetitions belying an undercurrent of menace. Rather than documenting active conflict, my work captures the war's ‘backstage’ production, accompanied by research through which I trace each filmed warship and submarine to their past and present involvement in global conflicts. By mapping the geopolitical, temporal, and affective dimensions of military rehearsal, Thursday War explores how cinema, performance, and tactical drills converge – not just to simulate conflict, but to actively manufacture the ideological scaffolding that makes war acceptable and thus possible.

Thursday War is a catalyst for my broader research project on the convergence of military training, theatre, and cinema, what I term “the military-stage complex.” I examine how military exercises use role-play and parafictional scenarios – from invented terrorist groups, fictional nations like “Brownia” and “Ginger” to the use of mock villages, actors and migrant labour – to blur the boundaries between reality and simulation. I explore how these war rehearsals operate as forms of “pre-enactment” (where repetition produces the future), making fiction operational, and ultimately normalising and reproducing violence under the guise of preparedness and security.

Please also see my related work: Get Back To Your Normal Life!

Currently, Thursday War takes shape through video work and lecture performances. I am developing a specially commissioned sound score in collaboration with the acclaimed New York City-based cellist and composer Julia Kent and the award-winning Bosnian-born, German-based soprano Ljiljana Winkler.

The first iteration of Thursday War as a video installation will premiere in 2027, please contact for further details.

Development of this project has been supported by the Arts Council England DYCP Grant, the University of the Arts London practice-based PhD research programme, and Open Research Europe.

Tweet by the Devon University Royal Naval Unit, 2017.

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