'Wrecked on the Intertidal Zone' was an enquiry into the Thames Estuary that used art to stir up the murky, muddy world of South Essex. Over the last few years YoHa has been supported by many local artists, fisherman, boatyards and especially the Belton Way Small Craft Club. We have worked with Critical Art Ensemble on Graveyard of Lost Species, Fran Gallardo on Dirty Talking and Goldsmiths and Southend-on-sea's own Andi Freeman who has been exploring the critical face citizen science.


Collectively we were preoccupied by the genealogical/ ecological/ political complexity of the Thames estuary. For YoHa this interest did not arise out of some sentimental idealised cosy relationship with nature as seen through a London window. For YoHa the complex estuaries resistance to the logics of computation and it's interrelation to technical objects makes it pathologically addictive.

Wrecked On the Intertidal Zone

a problem of sick self.

It is becoming difficult to imagine a world where work does not spill over into the rest of life, emails landing 24/7, increased pressures to achieve more than you are paid for that demonstrate your commitment, creativity and potential to your employer. In London we have the added pressure of trying to find a home to rent that you can afford and secure 'useful' employment to pay for it. What is the alternative to a world where you desire what you can not have, borrow to afford it and consume to gratify the desires that orchestrate your own entrapment. The pressures, anxieties we experience appear as a realism within contemporary capitalism, a space from which we cannot imagine a different society.

Plastic raft of Lampedusa, Shanghai to Berlin

Due to Matsuko being critically unwell in 2017 - this is a placeholder for Plastic Raft and does not contain information about all the people who worked on the project - please contact us a for a full account.

Somewhere in Europe, an artist is downloading Theodore Gericaults 1818-19 painting of the Raft of the Medusa and is busying themselves for a field-trip. An EasyJet ticket to Italy and on to Lampdusa. Armed with an artistic license they visit the morgues to take colour samples of dead and decaying skin. They study the bloating effect of drowning, and are fascinated at how rigor mortis of people clutching onto the handrails of sinking ships keeps the bodies sculpturally connected under water. The artist plans to ask survivors of the recent attempts to get to Europe to help re-enact their journeys so their photos can be collaged into the Raft of the Medusa. Driven on by the rhythmic knocking of dead skulls underwater he thinks of coconuts being banged together as he excitedly replaces the figures on the metaphorical raft with migrant Africans, Arabs and people from the Indian subcontinent. The art will eventually adorn the art institutes of Europe allowing for the intelligent and tasteful to consider something of the sublime suggested by Edmund Burke. Maritime disaster, allows us to read empathic sensations that make the European feel civilised while the crabs continue to eat the drown bodies of migrants.

Being an addict is frustratingly hard work, finding substances, food, shelter, care, treatment are complicated formations that require knowledge situated in the actions and reactions of being addicted yet this knowledge never enters into the machinery of governance that purportedly cares for drug users in the UK. This situated knowledge has much to tell us about forms of reticulated discipline that governs addicts and workers in the UK care system.

Endless War installation shot #3, at Kunsthal Arrhus. Photo: Arrhus, 2013.

How does the way war is thought relate to how it is fought?

As the Afghan war unfolds, it produces vast quantities of information that are encoded into database entries and can, in turn, be analyzed by software looking for repeated patterns of events, spatial information, kinds of actors, timings, and other factors. These analyses go on to inform military decision-making and alter the course of events in the air and on the ground.

How do you re-float a 12ton 40ft Fishing Bawley buried in the mud of the Thames Estuary for 7 years.

If you want the quick answer then watch the rough cut video.(edited by our old friend Alastair Oldham)

"Fortunately for us, witnesses want to speak about the disappeared.They are hoping for someone to tell their story to who has an interest in amending the social record. They want to hail the dead, the lost, and the disappeared to reconstitute them as significant, and to save them from their fate as an “acceptable loss” that gives the public permission to forget." see (Field Researchers Notes)

The Joys of Boredom

Investment Opportunity, yoha 2010

NHS Databases:

Database Documentary is a long-term investigation that seeks to understand how databases change our conduct. The initial research located itself within health databases and was initiated through discussions with Polly Moseley who was working with Liverpool Primary Care Trust trying to initiate a year of art and well being. Invisible Airs also grew out of database documentary.