On 30 April 1517, an angry crowd of Londoners gathered at St Paul’s churchyard and marched through the city. The object of their rage was the Dutch, French, Flemish and other immigrants from continental Europe, living in the city at such a “multitude” that “the poor English could scarce get any living.” (1) For several days beforehand, tensions had been rising. Young men roamed the streets targeting foreigners, some of whom “were stricken, and some buffeted, and some thrown in the canal.” (2) As darkness fell on the 30th, the protest march turned into a riot. A mob of over 1,000 people surged through the city, sacking the shops and houses of immigrant artisans and trying, unsuccessfully, to storm the well-guarded homes of wealthy merchants from Italy and Spain. By dawn, order had been restored. Numerous arrests and the execution of thirteen of the rioters followed quickly. But the Evil May Day riot, as it became known, remained notorious. It represented one of ‘the most dangerous moments of popular unrest seen in the Tudor capital,’ and likely led to ‘innumerable’ acts of hostility and discrimination in the following years. (3)

To be an immigrant in Tudor London was to be perpetually an outsider. Those born overseas were known as “aliens”. Even English people who hailed from outside London and were not citizens or freemen of the city, were called “foreigner” or “stranger”.

In 1500, there were around 3,000 immigrants living in London, approximately six percent of the city’s 50,000-strong population. Yet the alien minority were frequently cast as scapegoats for woes such as rising unemployment, falling trade and high taxes. Among their number, it was said, were “Papists, Anabaptists, Libertynes, drunkards, common women…murderers, thieves and Conspirators.” (4) Even those who had come to Britain fleeing religious persecution abroad were subject to resentment. As a minister complained to his congregation in 1570, the aliens sought “to take away the livings of our own Citizens and countrymen, and to eat by trade the bread out of their mouths.” (5)

What was it like to arrive in a city so hostile to your presence? To remain cast as an outsider irrespective of your desire to find belonging?

Five hundred years later, the question remains all too relevant. Now as then, to come to Britain seeking refuge from intolerable conditions abroad, is to risk being characterised as part of a “swarm” or an “invasion”. It is to be imagined as an alien or stranger. (As I write this, in the first week of August 2024, violent anti-immigrant riots, fanned by disinformation from the far right, are taking place in cities across Britain).

Stranger. An outsider. An intruder. A stranger is in the group yet never fully of the group. A stranger remains associated with their origins irrespective of how far they have travelled from them. A stranger is not an individual in their own right but the representative of a particular type.

How do we break free of this dispiriting pattern of dehumanisation? In which ways, and with which words, images and ideas, can we reach beyond binaries of them and us, alien and insider, to explore the shared experience of our humanity, in its richness, its complexity? What does it look like to conjure into being a communal sense of being and belonging? A notion of home as a joint proposition?

Congregation is presented as a projection-mapped installation within the 18th century church of St Mary le Strand, with the voices of all Devlin’s co-authors arranged in a sound sequence created by the composers Polyphonia. Constructed thus, as a composite portrait of lives originating from Iran, India, Eritrea, Sudan, Chile and Albania and many other countries, the artwork speaks simultaneously of scattering and gathering. It gestures to both the fraught experiences of violence and displacement, and to the possibilities of kinship and connection that might result from the act of gathering together, even in conditions of extremis.

In staging Congregation on the Strand, a foundational migratory artery through the city since AD93, Devlin also highlights the shifting patterns of arrival and exchange that have helped shaped London. St Mary le Strand itself sits within the old borders of the 8th century Anglo-Saxon port town of Lundenwic, which stretched along the north side of the Strand to Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square, and was a trading centre for merchants and immigrants from the Netherlands, Germany and other nations. In the 18th century immigrant publishers such as Peter de Varennes of France, whose son was buried at St Mary le Strand, and Abraham Vandenhoeck, the Dutch founder of Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, which remains in business today, turned the Strand into a centre for London’s book trade. The street was where scores of Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, came to settle, among them the forebears of the art collector Samuel Courtauld, who founded the Courtauld in 1932. And it was also the destination for several itinerant self-exhibitors struggling to make a secure home for themselves against unfavourable circumstances. These included the German street performer John Valerius, who was born without arms, and became famous for the deftness with which he played the violin with his toes, and Józef Boruwłaski, a Polish-born dwarf, musician and self-styled count who stood 99 cm tall, and received paying visitors at home that came to gawk at his diminutive height.

Every evening during the six-day presentation of Congregation, a different choir, whose members all have foreign origins, including the London Bulgarian Choir and the London African Gospel Choir, will perform outside the church. What will they sing of? Faith, devotion, the stories of their homeland, perhaps. But maybe, intertwined between hymns and folk songs, they might also speak of what it is historically, to be a stranger, located at the margins of society. In doing so they might make a distinction between the experience of marginalisation, as imposed by oppressive structures of power, and the sense of marginality one chooses as an act of resistance. To be confined to the margins, outside the main body of society, is to know the pain and the struggle of exclusion and othering. But the margin is also the generative space. It is the place we shape on our own terms, free from the bigotries of the mainstream. It is the space, as the scholar bell hooks wrote, ‘which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world.’ (9)

Congregation follows Devlin’s previous immersive installation, Come Home Again (2022), in which she assembled drawings of the 243 species on London’s priority conservation list (including moths, birds, beetles, fungi and wildflowers) to create a ‘choral sculpture’ of images and song that invited visitors ‘to see, hear, and feel our home, our city as an interconnected web of species and cultures.’ (10)

In both installations, Devlin deploys sound as a signal element of her artworks: sung voices, personal testimony, the calls of wild creatures. What emerges is a thrilling and expansive acoustemology, a sonic way of knowing and being in the world, that takes empathy and fellow feeling between humans, and with other life forms, such as plants, insects and fungi, as the ethical basis by which to live on Earth. This is not to suggest a direct parallel between the lives of humans and non-humans. Rather, it is to invite us to ponder the texture of the existence, forged out of ‘conjunctions, disjunctions, and entanglements’, that we, as creatures of the earth and sky and water, create together in a multitudinous city like London. (11)

For at least half a millennium, from Evil May Day to the riots of summer 2024, the closed-minded have insisted that the only outcome of our coming together in our difference will be chaos. But as the anthropologist Tim Ingold reminds us, we are each of us wayfarers, feeling our way through a world that ‘is itself in motion, continually coming into being through the combined action of human and non-human agencies.’ (12) Our presence in a city, in a street, in an 18th century church, is a form of world-making in its own right; the air and the earth shifting in consistency and potentiality through the fact of our gathering and the histories and perspectives we exchange when we meet in congregation. In amongst the jostling terrain of our shared aliveness, there is room enough for everyone to be at home. Room enough that no-one need be an alien or a stranger.