Welcome to our studio
This is the area where we build things
out of toothpicks and peanuts
You can see this is our collection, here on the left
And the right is dedicated to dodo eggs and drums
both of which are involved
in current projects that we're working on
That's a dodo
I can demonstrate how this works
The dodo is the first creature
to be made extinct by human activity
This is a member of the Pussy Riot group
that we photographed last summer, in Moscow
using a new form of surveillance camera
that doesn't only create a photograph
but a kind of three-dimensional rendering of the human head
Adam and I started working in a very traditional documentary mode
taking portraits of people
in the sort of places that photographers like to go to
like psychiatric hospitals, and war zones
and prisons, and these kind of places
and there came a point in that process
where we sort of lost faith in the photographic engagement
and we reached a sort of crisis with the medium
and started to make work that was much more referential, in a way
about photography
Increasingly, our practice has become about us acting
as these kind of hidden counterinsurgents
to try and enter into the system of power
The show at Tate at the moment, it's a really interesting premise
because it's about the history of war
and its relationship to photography
and that's a theme that's an enduring theme of our practice
Attention! March! Left, right, left, right
left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right
We decided to make an insurgent into the show
with a performance involving 18 young military cadets
aged 14 to 18
And these cadets are very inexperienced
they're just learning how to march
they're learning how to drum, and play other instruments
They represent, for us, an example of a young person
being pushed through the mechanism of the military
The drumroll is designed to create anticipation
in that you imagine in the circus, the drumroll
and the tiger jumps through the hoop
We've tried to extend it indefinitely
so it actually undoes its purpose
They all participate in keeping this drumroll going
for a period of an hour
The history of the drum in the military
is a really interesting one
In the beginning, they used to have a really young boy
up to the age of seven, marching in front of the troops
in the old days, when troops would just march in a line
and be mowed down
And there was a so-called etiquette
that the drummer boy would be spared, if possible
10% of those 18 cadets
will go on to see military conflict
and I think just the idea of seeing that body
and looking at it as a piece of work
and just thinking about that body facing such kind of violence
somehow that would be the horror of it
Ten to twenty five minutes late!
They're actually more interested
in the outside world, the real world
than we are interested in the art world
And I think that's a really important dictum
that we try and follow