ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the project and how it performs as a work of activism. Extending beyond the representation of disabled people alone to examine the sweep of austerity across the UK, disabled people were nonetheless disproportionately highly represented because of the excessive injury undergone by that community. The effects of austerity have been experienced unequally across the population. The siting of figures on the south shore of the Thames placed the performance in geographic opposition to the UK’s primary institutions of austerity: Parliament, old Fleet Street of journalism, the legal district, the financial centre of Canary Wharf. The project’s position on austerity was evidently oppositional; conversations, however, were deliberately open-ended, beginning from the experience and knowledge of the participating public in order to encourage involvement and keep it relevant. Every figure was paired with a short narrative of a person at the sharp end of austerity, written to convey both the human cost and the humanity of those it harms.
