“Races” is a project that considers the intersections of race, gender, class, and colonialist thought that underpin the privileges of British institutions and the current political climate. It is an attempt to have a dialogue at the architectural embodiment of these concepts at the Folkestone Racecourse before it’s demolished to make way for gentrification and the promotion of aspirational lifestyles. What does accountability look like when the society that is encouraged is one that keeps re-building the structures of oppression and inequality already pervasive and continually re-emerging under the guise of regeneration?

Tongue clicking through my right cheek, echoes spread between the now defunct buildings of the racecourse. The three buildings (lower, main, and grand stands) eerily resonate social and economic class divisions. The plaque of Lord Kitchener looms over the national flag, the flying cellophane opens into a ribbon in front of it that loops and entangles us into a reminder of his complicitous ideology of empire and concentration camps.

Balancing both my plimsolls in jars containing two pigments (Ultramarine blue and German red earth) and steadied by metal rods, I walk precariously until I trip, scattering the powder onto the cemented path. Raising the blue pigment skywards with one rod, I let it fall over my body, staining my head and clothes. I pound my chest with white chalk. The wind picks up, pulling at the cellophane roll on the other rod in my raised hand, unwinding it. It tails upwards. I rewind the clear plastic around my body by rolling on the ground, arms above my head, wrapped, constrained by its invisible cling. At the grand stands, holding a pillowcase of white feathers from the doves that have nestled in the roof, I climb and stand on the ledge of the window of the hospitality suite, knocking. On the racecourse, I loop builder’s line across the track, wrap it around my tongue, trace it over my face, and fix it with staples, until it is attached to my head, my left shoulder, left arm and index finger. I point onto the furloughs in the distance. Leaning my body outwards it slowly pulls the yellow line out of the steel clips, out of my blue stained shirt, until I am loose. In my palm I hold the lump of rosewater-clumped violet pigment that had been in my left breast pocket and run along the white railing, staining the fence.