The Circle and the Square, Brierfield, United Kingdom, 2015-2017 

In this three-year project with the people of Pendle in Northwest England Lacy explores the demise of the textile industry as an economic and social driver in the North West of England and the resulting separation of South Asian-heritage and white communities who used to work together in the vast mills there. This localised critical inquiry into race, work, and capitalism, captured as a three day performance in the epic spaces of one such mill that stands as a symbolic remnant of the globalised trade in skills, commodities and people across the world.

in September 2016, the community came together over three days, along with Shape Note singers from across England, to perform and to film themselves in the place where many used to work. Hundreds of voices resonated in the mill’s vast spaces, using traditional and fusion forms of vocal and spiritual expression including Shape Note singing and Sufi chanting. The production was a distillation of months of community conversations and collective chanting and singing that ended in a dinner with 500 hundred residents in the largest gathering in the mill since its doors were closed. A year later Lacy and filmmakers Mark Thomas and Graham Kay presented a multichannel video installation in the same mill, with a Resource Room in the old Brierfield City Hall that captured the performances, interviews, and processes from the exploration.

This installation has subsequently been exhibited as a two channel projection combined with 8 monitors; a second more intimate two channel video; and a resource room offering insights into the project and its community, through a documentary film, books and digitized archives and a timeline on historic rise and fall of the textile industry; the rise and fall of Lancashire Solfa (Shape Note) singing; the introduction of Sufi Dhikr chanting brought by Pakistani migrants who came to work in the mills from the late 1950s onwards; and  a brief overview of the project development.

Collaborators include anthropologist Massimiliano Mollona of Goldsmith’s College, London, musicologist Ron Pen of the University of Kentucky, USA, Rauf Bashir, of the Free Spiritual Centre and Building Bridges Pendle, filmmaker Mark Thomas of Soup Co., and community organizer Paul Hartley of In-Situ. The project was commissioned by Super Slow Ways.