Imran Perretta’s Requiem for the Dispossessed

On 4 August 2011, London’s Metropolitan Police shot and killed Mark Duggan, a Black man, in circumstances which were contested. Duggan’s death, amid longstanding tensions between police and the Black community, catalyzed peaceful protests against police brutality. Following reports of clashes between the police and a teenage girl – set against youth alienation and acutely felt austerity measures – dissent morphed into civil unrest, with looting and rioting spreading across the country. In an immersive exhibition at Somerset House Studios, ‘A Riot in Three Acts’, Imran Perretta – resident artist, composer and filmmaker – has designed a replica of Reeves Corner in Croydon, where one of the House of Reeves buildings, a century-old family-owned furniture store, was set alight on 8 August 2011. 

Today Reeves Corner is a derelict, vacant site in the centre of a commercial area. It is surrounded by a white picket fence, the ground covered with gravel and dotted with cracked, brutalist-style concrete planters designed to hold trees, but largely swallowed by debris and weeds instead. Perretta’s theatre-set re-creation of Reeves Corner flaunts its plasticity. Though there’s realism in the painted, muted backdrop depicting the surviving House of Reeves premises, Perretta’s design is flattened through the visible artifice of the wooden structure holding up the painting and the stage lights on the ceiling. 

In an adjacent room, a vitrine holds an old BlackBerry handset on which plays hypnotic footage of the House of Reeves engulfed in flame. Another case features text from the Riot Act (1714) that states the King ‘chargeth and commandeth’ rioters to cease, whilst a Daily Mirror article from 9 August 2011, headlined ‘YOB RULE’, suggests that the rioters are challenging the monarch’s sovereignty. Bypassing attempts to rationalize or moralize the rioters’ freedom as dangerous or senseless, Perretta evokes the visceral experience of a broader struggle for agency and authority through his score, ‘Requiem for the Dispossessed’ (2024).

Performed by the four-piece Manchester Camerata and played from surround-sound speakers installed in wall niches, the score is simultaneously intimate and immense. The requiem, a Roman Catholic Mass for funerals or memorials, is divided here into nine parts – from Introit to In Paradisum (Into Paradise) – that connect civil unrest with the retributive arc of the Day of Judgement. 

At a compact 40 minutes, the score is inspired by the pithy impact of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D Minor (1887–90), but eschews that work’s serenity. Though it begins gently, the calm quickly gives way to an anxious tremolo as the strings increase in number and volume. At its tensest, there is a counterpoint between the melodies of sharper violins and the deeper, erratic staccato of the cello. The clash between these strings recalls a line from Maggie Nelson’s Like Love (2020), in which she describes a tone ‘that flickers with agency informed by its dispossession’. Throughout the score, the chords ricochet between major and minor; I feel myself pulled up and pushed down. The momentum moves audiences out of any resignation and into struggle.

Inattention and inaction have led to the purgatory in which Reeves Corner finds itself – a nondescript site as derelict now as it was 13 years ago. Perretta’s exhibition is accompanied by a series of three satellite events, the first of which, ‘Act I: Retrieving Croydonia’, saw panellists Lina Ivanova, RESOLVE Collective and Turf Projects describe their adolescent feelings during the riots and its aftermath as a ‘keenness for things to happen’. Through the journey of his cinematic score, Perretta rekindles this spark of possibility.

Imran Perretta’s ‘A Riot in Three Acts’ is on view at Somerset House Studios until 10 November

^{Main image: Imran Perretta, 'A Riot in Three Acts', 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Somerset House Studios; photograph: Josef Konczak}