Holding The Street
Holding The Street (2026)
94min; B&W; 4K; stereo; English with German subtitles.
Holding The Street developed throughout 2025 in informal and intimate recordings with practitioners across art, journalism, activism, and research. Filmed in the UK and Germany, it examines culture’s relationship to state repression.
With a focus on Berlin, Holding The Street documents personal stories of being silenced alongside collective strategies of resistance to coercion and censorship.
The film asks: what happens when our institutions demand alliances or fail to acknowledge their power in times of crisis? What forms of resistance are open to us when we have caring responsibilities - towards our own or others’ bodies?
above: Holding The Street, (video still, 2026).
cont.
The horizontal figure is a recurring presence. Many conversations in the film take place lying down, paralleling fatigued and toppled and birthing bodies.
Conversations are extended with footage from the artist’s domestic life and filming at Berlin’s Spandau Citadel. This fortress-turned-archive is home to live bat enclosures, and monuments that were removed from public spaces by successive governments between 1849-1986.
Beginning from a position of care, Holding The Street pursues a language of political practice uninhibited by institutional vocabularies.
Contributors: Nicky Böhm (artist and organiser, Berlin); Helen Charman (researcher, Cambridge); Sophie Dimitriou (artist and organiser, Berlin); Ute Frevert (researcher, Berlin); Nora Heidorn (researcher, Berlin/Vienna); Clare Hemmings (researcher, London); Zoe C Miller, (artist and organiser, Berlin); Tamar Novick (researcher, Berlin/Munich); Hanan Toukan (researcher, Berlin/Cyprus); Andy Vantino (journalist, Berlin).
