https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.34210.80323

Dissonant Laws is an exhibition and collaboration by LORE (Legal Origins Rights Education & Art) and MEANS magazine, running from February to June 2026 at The Foundry, Vauxhall, London. It explores the tense relationship between citizens and authority, featuring art that highlights law-breaking as artistic resistance, including works on rave culture, protest, and environmental rights. It seeks to unpick the relationship between citizens, authority, and rebellious invention. How do laws create or engender artistic resistance? And how do those forms of creative dissent in turn infer new forms of legality? What examples of artistic protest have emerged in response to legislative change?

by Dr Heather McKnight

Layla Hignell-Tully and Heather McKnight from Magnetic Ideals and have one of our videos showing at this Exhibition in London.

We filmed the video for our song ‘Self Care’ on a beautiful day in Lewes as lockdown began to lift. The first time we had met in person in a long time, and it was great to be outdoors and find some creative positivity in dark times, but still sat in discomfort in the times of broader multiple crises, protests and fear. This song was not the lockdown songs we had been struggling to write over digitally distorted video calls. It was a chance to embody in person some playful and serious moments, finding some kind of joy, in order to thrive under challenging conditions. 

Mummy’s a bit hairy, mummy’s got holes 

(that’s true baby, but she doesn’t want everyone to know…) – lyrics from song

We are inspired by Adrienne Maree Brown’s work, which centres around the concept of pleasure activism, and asserts “that we all need and deserve pleasure and that our social structures must reflect that.”[i] Here, dissonance and the ability to be at odds with the times that restrict us and others are a key part of this, dissonance is not a breakdown but a source of resistance and authenticity…

“Anyone can dance with anyone to form a collective” Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life p. 248

Participatory invitation: we invite you to form a collective and dance with us in space, to find cracks in the darkness of the lived moment. This is an invitation, not an instruction, as Ahmed notes that not dancing when it is expected of us, and not desired, it is also a form of resistance. We invite people to reflect on how they make space to care for themselves, for each other, for the winged pollinators that our moth, butterfly and queen bee capes represent as they flutter in the wind and find pleasure in dissonance…

Ahmed notes in her lecture Snap  “Think of how all the frustration, that rage, can become a tipping point. It is only when you seem to lose it, when you shout, swear, spill, that you have their attention. And then you become a spectacle.”[ii] In Fuck You and Your A-Sides we try to own our spectacle, as we write our songs, we swear, we laugh, we become gentle, we dance and then cry…

We resist when we’re still in the time between tasks

We resist while we spill, we resist while we dance – lyrics from song

In this song, written from a place of exhaustion “what can we become/what have we become” intertwined in their own dance of hopefulness and failure. Much literature around care in the digital realm focuses on self-care, individualising failure, and a culture of blame emerges if you do not satisfactorily perform self-care. As Audrey Lorde notes “We do not get there from here by ignoring all of the mud in-between those positions” [iii] – that if you do not learn by your errors you die by them as we sing the words “Failing is trying and it’s part of the fight” there are no attempts for perfection in the recording or the filming, no second takes, every error preserved. It is all very much in the moment; we have no time for anything else in a world of demands and expectations. As Adrienne Maree Brown notes, “there are times when we are truly all in the trenches of shadow times, dragging each other through salt and mud and just barely making our way through it.” [iv] Creativity as self-care happens for us in the moments we have stolen from the rest of the work, or it does not happen at all.

We recognise the dissonance of self-care narratives from a feminist perspective. This is a normative practice; it can be twisted back into another task, another tool of measurement against which to succeed or fail. Here, we are not condemning all forms of self-care, or in any way suggesting there is no worth in self-care practices, particularly the powerful black queer feminist self-care heritage of Audrey Lorde: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” [v] These forms of radical self-care are deeply important. Thanks to Sara Ahmed and Cyndi Lauper for inspiring our lyrics, to Tove for her dancing, and to Chris Kuzmicki and Daniel Hignell-Tully for helping with the film and camera and to Lucy Finchett-Maddock for the beauty of the lore.

For more of our music, see – Fuck You and Your A-Sides

If you are in London check out the rest of this amazing exhibition!

End Notes

[i] Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy): 1 (AK Press, 2019).

[ii] Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press Books, 2017), 248.

[iii] Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: And Other Essays, Later Edition (Dover Publications Inc., 2017).

[iv] Brown, adrienne maree, ‘If You’re Good, Say You’re Good’.

[v] Lorde, A Burst of Light.