This promenade performance invites the audience to follow artists Holly Davey and Eloise Fornieles into the depths of the Fine Art Archive at the British School at Rome. Using the files to unlock the words, gestures and movements of Marjorie Meggitt and Frances Bruce—the first women to be awarded the Sculpture Prize, in consecutive years in 1932 and 1933—the artists retrace two lives shaped by the institutional advocates and adversaries they encountered. Their stories reveal how gender, class and privilege determined who could enter, belong to and succeed within the institution, and how Meggitt and Bruce worked both within and against these structures, changing what was possible for generations of artists who followed.

The performance reaches back through traces held within the archive, not simply to recover the lives of artists from the past, but to generate new artworks. Documents, correspondence, and photographs become material for voice, movement and performance, bringing historical bodies into dialogue with living ones and asking what remains, what disappears, and what can be reactivated through the archive.

Created as part of the British School at Rome’s 125th anniversary, Holly Davey and Eloise Forieles work with creative collaborator Dr Andrea Fredericksen and BSR archivist Alessandra Giovenco to look back at the institution’s history in order to consider the artists, relationships and structures that have shaped it—and the possibilities they have been made available to those who came after.

This performance is kindly supported by British Academy, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL Art Museum, The London Arts & Humanities Partnership, Wales Arts International, Arts Council of Wales.