A landscape of urban regeneration recedes from view as a blackout blind drops, submerging the room in darkness and temporarily separating its inhabitants from the city. A manifesto begins, describing the continuous construction of the metropolis as ‘slow violence’ – seductive in its scale and oppressive in its intent. The manifesto’s delivery is aided by a slide projector, which at first punctuates the presentation with titles and supporting statements but increasingly submits its own agenda in a bid to control those present. A feed of slides show the hoardings that surround construction sites, concealing its industry with vistas of future inhabitants in a utopian ecstasy. These lifestyle advetisments are mixed with didactic statements and the images of death and illness on the cigarette packets that litter the city streets.

The manifesto, while describing the violence of the city, also offers obtuse defense mechanisms for living there, methods of carving out liminal spaces within the physicality of the city; while simultaneously the slide projector and the film itself seem to act out these same methods. The manifesto’s audience are left to present evidence of their free agency, in denial that they are not even living in a city, but in a machine which trains them for its use.