We

Inspired by the dystopian fiction of Yevgeny Zamyatin and the minimal synthesiser music of the early 80s, London-based artist duo Pil and Galia Kollectiv are joined by Victor M. Jakeman and Ruth Angel Edwards to present popular chart hits in new versions, turning songs about 'me' and

'you' into songs about 'us', and replacing the individual 'I' with the collective 'WE'.

"You're in a bad way! Apparently, you've developed a soul." (Yevegeny Zamyatin, We, 1920).

The performance WE reveals the latent politics of the love song by annihilating its liberal subject; through the simple substitution of the plural for the singular, intimacy becomes a form of collective action and the unique the universal. Sonically, WE follows in the footsteps of bands like The Better Beatles, who sought to improve on the canon of popular music by stripping it bare, even.

“It is Marx who, for ‘general intellect’, uses the term ‘social individual’. We can postulate that the

general is something pre-individual, a kind of general consciousness that exists before individuals form, and from which they form. This general pre-individual is a ‘we’ that exists before the different I’s develop, so is not the sum of all I’s.” - Paolo Virno