When the Windrush scandal began to surface after 2017, Zinzi Minott was struck by how the country seemed to fall silent. In the first days after the news broke, she says, people and institutions were too afraid to speak up. “No one did anything quick enough, it was really ugly,” the London-based artist recalls. “I was like: ‘I can’t watch this. I can’t not say anything and carry on like this is OK.’”
In response, Minott created Fi Dem, a six-minute film that splices archival footage from the arrival of the Empire Windrush with home videos of her family. It’s a tribute to those affected by the ongoing injustices, including her late grandmother who arrived from the Caribbean and worked as an NHS nurse. “The community I’m from and the people that raised me sacrificed a lot,” she says. “I wanted to make sure that these people were acknowledged. It felt like if I didn’t say anything, nobody else was going to.”
Fi Dem has been adapted and re-shown every year since. This week, to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the HMT Empire Windrush docking, Minott presents the film’s sixth iteration at London’s LGBTQ+-led arts centre Queercircle, accompanied by a collection of new prints. It’s a project she pledges to continue for life, or “until we get reparations”.
“It’s about making a commitment to my community and to myself,” she adds. “But it’s also about the incompetence of the UK to hold its own history, which means I have to keep repeating these images.”
Before she started experimenting with film, Minott trained as a dancer, combining her formal education at London’s Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance with the lifelong grounding she built at Caribbean community events. It was a creative outlet that brought her joy, but which came with complications. “As a dancer, you’re not encouraged to have autonomy over your body, you’re encouraged to do as you’re told and that your body is always accessible,” she says. “As a dancer, but also as a Black woman and a queer person, that was a very dangerous place for me to be.”
After a string of incidents where racist abuse was hurled at her while she performed on stage, Minott sought a safer way to express herself. She found that film-making allowed her to continue to dance and communicate what she wanted to say on her own terms. Using a 10-year-old laptop and a cracked version of Adobe Premiere, she made One Lyrical Bitch Solo in 2016, an archival film performance and installation examining the position of Black women in dance.
Minott’s own diasporic identity is central to much of her practice, as a dancer, a film-maker, a print-maker and, more recently, a sculptor. In 2022, she built Bloodsound, a transparent 6ft sound system filled with blood – a nod to the music and technology that is a pillar in her London Caribbean community, but also to the increasingly invisible figures at the helm of the subculture, which she finds is repeatedly co-opted. “The sound system wasn’t designed for techno raves, it was designed for the ancestors of enslaved people to amplify themselves,” she says. “[Bloodsound] is really trying to have a conversation about the invisibility of Black bodies and Black pain, and the relationship to our blood through our systems: the sound system and the political systems.”
The accompanying score fuses together excerpts of speeches by political figures like David Lammy and Aneurin Bevan, samples of lovers rock and dub and personal recordings of her grandmother discussing race. Occasionally, it’s interrupted and distorted. “It’s not entertainment, it’s really glitchy. Every time you think you’ve found the beat, something happens,” she says. “I don’t want people just dancing around the exhibition. I want there to be open ears and not just complete comfort.”
This concept of “the glitch” can be traced throughout Minott’s work. While the audio in Bloodsound is fractured, the footage in Fi Dem stutters and repeats, intercepted by stock footage of static. It’s an intentionally jarring technique that allows her to convey her experiences of racism.
“I think the glitch and the unsettledness of the image is the unsettledness of my life, of the community’s life. The image can’t roll smooth because the life can’t roll smooth,” she says. “When Black people have a party and the party can’t finish because somebody thinks we’re robbing the place, that’s the glitch,” she continues. “It’s this constant interference.”
Six years on from the first instalment of Fi Dem, the interference is still felt. “There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors that happen,” Minott says, citing the funding and programming across institutions in the UK. “But the people affected by the Windrush scandal, the promises that were made to those affected, are being revoked.” In the meantime, she will continue to use her platform and her skills as an artist to contribute to the conversations she wants to happen. “I might not fully understand it, I definitely don’t want to overstate it, but I definitely believe that art has a power, within us and beyond us all,” she says. “I guess art is my space to say what I want.”
• Many Mikl Mek Ah Mukl runs at Queercircle, London, from 22 June–27 August
