Over the past year Josephine Sweeney began investigating Manston Airport in Kent (currently inoperative). This site gave specificity to ongoing research around globalisation, logos, memorial architecture and portals. One resulting iteration of the research was ‘A Logo for a Lungfish’ – a stagnant boggy water feature which takes its form from the meridian floor design at the airport.

Josephine took part in ‘The Incomers Project’, led by Sally O’Reilly, a series of writing workshops addressing the question: ‘what happens when we try and tell other people’s stories?’ This developed into ongoing research about scamming, its historic and contemporary significance – as agitation, as destabilisation, as something symptomatic of our confidence / lack of it in one another. ‘How Are You’ – played as part of ‘The Incomers Tour’ – is a sound piece in which a medley of scam emails are reforged into a siren-like song in an attempt to give voice and legitimacy to a mythic scam character.

Along with fellow ‘Hot Mess’ associates, Josephine organised and ran events such as ‘Tool Making for a Precarious Future’, a workshop exploring the application of materials in troublesome ecological times. In collaboration with Kris Lock, Josephine ran a series of workshops exploring the dark web; ‘Virtual Speleology’ took members of the public on a group ‘tor’ of the dark web’s more interesting and radical architecture. As part of the ‘Spelunking’ programme, Kris and Josephine hosted ‘Agitation Jeopardy’ – part cryptocurrency lecture, part sand themed game show, devised as a way to examine the intersections between virtual and physical mining.