MONUMENT TO THE VANQUISHED PEASANT: A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF ENCLOSURE (Working titile)
RAD Fund
Director
Leah Gordon
Development support
MONUMENT TO THE VANQUISHED PEASANT: A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF ENCLOSURE is an experimental film-essay telling the history of the enclosures, using footage of folk traditions, underscored by the voices and testaments of commoners, activists, and the rural dispossessed, weaving a multi-voiced history of the loss of commons from below.
LEAH GORDON – DIRECTOR/PRODUCER
Leah Gordon is an artist, curator, and writer. Her work explores the intersectional histories of the Caribbean plantation system, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Enclosure Acts, and the creation of the British working-class. In the 1980s she wrote lyrics, sang, and played for a feminist folk punk band. Gordon’s film and photographic work has been exhibited internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Dak’art Biennale. In 2022, her award-winning feature-length documentary Kanaval: A People’s History of Haiti in Six Chapters was broadcast in selected cinemas and on BBC 4’s Arena. In 2022, Gordon also exhibited at documenta fifteen, Kassel; her work showed at MOCA North, Miami; Power Plant Gallery, Duke University, NC, USA, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany. Her enclosure project will be published as a book, co-authored with Stephen Ellcock, and shown in a major museum exhibition in 2025
