We Will Replace All Men With Machines is a spoken and sung performance, as well as a slogan printed in several media, and was the result of a two part residency in the public spaces of the Barbican Centre, London.  The artworks address the ambivalence about technological ‘progress’ expressed by feminists in the 1970s and 1980s and was funded by a commission for the Life Rewired season of events and exhibitions. 

By installing a wall of screenprints which faced the public lobby and undertaking daily performances, a former retail space within the Barbican became a stage on which divergent feminist perspectives were revisited and respoken. Reconfigured as a space of broadcast to audiences entering the theatre or concert halls, the installation also incorporated a loop of an episode of Paper Tiger TV narrated by feminist technoscience theorist Donna Haraway, and a performance collaboration with the artist Fritha Jenkins.

Songs about masculinity and militarism were memorised from meetings with feminist writer Cynthia Cockburn, who passed away in the months between the first and second residency. In the second episode of the residency, image and documentation from the first performance was installed to create a place of encounter and discussion, including with the feminist theorist Clare Hemmings, and a reading of Cynthia Cockburn’s work Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change (Pluto,1983).

First residency 
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2019/event/nina-wakeford-residency

Second residency
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2019/series/life-rewired-hub