It starts in flames.

Flickering on the screen of an old BlackBerry, its landscape display diminishing them in scale, they could, at first glance, be part of any number of blazing bodies – logs burning with homely warmth in a living room hearth, a bonfire lit in ambiguous celebration of a failed regicide, a beacon to signal an alarm across breadth of an imperilled nation. But the phone belongs to Imran Perretta and the flames are a video message, spread like wildfire as the outpouring of pent-up emotions that followed the police shooting of Mark Duggan in 2011, having reached ignition point, became combustible. Seen in this light, they have the urgency of a call to action, a telegraph of fiery tongues insisting upon a response, right there, right then.

Re-contextualised, partially defused behind the unbroken glass of a gallery display case, it sets the opening scene of Perretta’s A Riot In Three Acts, a work which gives pause to that outpouring, and, without diminishing it, affords the time and space for empathetic attention. A second display, showcasing some of Perretta’s research materials, shows the protest seen from the outside as a tabloid headline brands the protestors as ‘yobs’, stoking fears of mob rule, as the riots seemed to spread, uncontainable, from city to city.

For Perretta, then living in South London, ground zero was Reeves Corner, the source of the flames in the video message, where a furniture store had been set alight. This store, reconstructed as a painted backdrop, sets the scene for Perretta’s second act; a re-creation of the locale in aftermath, its stage the gravel of urban neglect, its dressing the concrete of untended planters. Its installation in a gallery space sets it at one remove, almost as though cordoned off by police tape, but the visitor is encouraged to encroach, to feel the uneven ground beneath their feet and to take in the familiar detritus of uncared for communality.

Having entered into its dispirit, its metaphors are unavoidable. What foliage there is, rooted in ground blighted by the discarded conveniences of single-use lifestyles lived at takeaway speed, is stunted, untended or dying. Croydon-specific, it could nonetheless be any similar space in this divided kingdom, from Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens to the public houses one street back from Blackpool’s Golden Mile. Uninhabited, it feels like the morning after the night before, far beyond closing time, or the rolling of the end credits.

Which is where Perretta’s third act comes him. His canvas and mortar Reeves Corner does not exist in silence, but is under-scored by the score he has written for the piece, A Requiem For The Dispossessed, one which brings the stillness of a set without actors into a mournful vivacity. Beautifully realised, in collaboration with Manchester’s own Camerata, it bleeds out into the world beyond its space in HOME, allowing the city, with its own spirits of civil unrest to bleed back in, so that the listener can’t quite be certain whether the sirens they hear are coming from the streets outside or within.

It can be read, perhaps, as a kind of Blue Plaque for Duggan’s death; his killing unlikely to be dignified by any such official recognition. Equally, in the aftermath of last year’s riots – ones whipped up by actors with motivations wholly at odds with those who have taken to the streets time and again to protest against the very real two-tier policing that sees young black men still far more likely to find themselves targeted in a taser’s sites than their white peers – it serves as a reminder of fire’s unbiddable nature. Like the conflagrations in Hollywood that ushered in 2025, a flame’s course, once lit, is impossible to control or predict, subject to the vagaries of whoever might choose to fan it, and who might be handing them the petrol can.

In extending thought to those whose lives might otherwise pass with barely a second one, Perretta’s three acts are, at the last, also a call for action, as instantly insistent as a video message flashing from phone to phone. It urges redress for the oppressed, a flame that offers the hope of reconstruction rather than the inferno that follows from burning down the house.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: credit Michael Pollard

 

A Riot In Three Acts by Imran Perretta is at HOME, Manchester until June 8, 2025. For more information, click here.