Somerset House in London used to be known as the “national beehive”, says artist and film-maker Onyeka Igwe, as she leads the way through corridors and down stone steps to her studio in the building’s inner reaches. As the former home of the Inland Revenue, and the General Register Office responsible for recording births, deaths and marriages, Somerset House once held all the information necessary to tax and manage the population. “There were so many workers here,” Igwe says.
Archives are the prosaic raw materials of her films – stories of resistance, dispossession and the power of communal activism for which she and fellow London-born and -based artist, writer and musician Morgan Quaintance have been made joint recipients of the 2025 Film London Jarman award.
