Rowland Hill                                                                                                                                                                                      Bio/Contact    

The Hands of God (2019) interactive, open duration performance

For Against the Run of Play, an evening of performances responding to the Women’s World Cup 2019, I invited an audience to divine the outcome of the tournemant as a collective animal oracle. To do this, I staged every game in miniature -- from group through to knockout stages -- using a crab-like pinball football game. Accompanied by commentary from David Attenborough documentaries, strangers were invited to play against one another and channel what Donna Haraway calls ‘tentacular thinking.’  

The work was made as a comment on the UK media’s historic lacklustre coverage of women’s football, reflected by the apparent absence of any predictions made this year by animals, a phenomenon of men’s World Cups since Paul the Octopus became a household name in 2010.