PHOTOGRAPHY Anne Tetzlaff
Last weekend, the vaulted tunnels beneath Somerset House came alive for AGM 2025, the annual late-night takeover of Somerset House Studios that’s become a cult Frieze Week ritual. This year, the event transformed the building’s hidden tunnels underneath the courtyard – the Deadhouse, a network of passageways lined with 17th-century gravestones – into a maze of performance, sound and transformation.
This year’s AGM invited artists to explore the space between life and death, concealment and revelation. Among the night’s most talked-about works was We Got Spirit, a collaboration between Somerset House Studios resident Gray Wielebinski and producer, DJ, and astrologer Manuka Honey. Drawing on the duo’s shared Texan roots, the performance reimagined cheerleading as a queer ritual of subversion, tapping into what Manuka calls “the demented nature of American peppiness occurring amidst fascism and genocide alongside the supernatural interpretation of the word” – playing on the double meaning of “spirit” as both mystical invocation and the twisted optimism of patriotic spectacle.
Wielebinski, whose work spans installation, video, drawing, performance, and sculpture, often interrogates mythology, identity, American cultural codes, and secret or subcultural spaces as lenses for reflection. Meanwhile, Manuka (born Marissa Malik) contributed her signature dark, immersive sound, weaving archival Texas football audio and spectral vocals into the performance – sensorily enhanced by olfactory artist agustine zegers – moving fluidly between classic club beats and diasporic sonic traditions.
Below, the artists look back on the process of making We Got Spirit, discussing queering national mythologies, working across mediums, and how they channelled nostalgia, dissonance, and desire into a haunting of the American dream.
Can you talk us through your creative process for this project, and how you approached it collectively?
Gray: Once we decided to work together, we started planning from our shared origin point of growing up in Texas and our interest in the landscape and its tropes – everything from the smells of cement and the desert to the norms produced by the high school experience, cheerleading, and sports. For both of us, London is our home and heavily informs our practices, but part of that inherently involves representing foreignness or difference. This ended up being a really fruitful starting point for the collaboration.
Gray, your new work at AGM 2025 reimagines cheerleading as something subcultural. What first drew you to this world, and what does queering it open up for you artistically?
Gray: Growing up, I played a lot of sports, and the emotional and aesthetic world of sport continues to inform my practice. Cheerleading is fascinating because it’s both a sport and an art, but often denigrated as neither. Of course, a lot of this has to do with the way value is filtered through gender. Cheerleading is gendered feminine but also involves what are sometimes coded as masculine qualities, such as athletic virtuosity, strength, risk, and discipline. Dislodging cheerleading from the usual contexts in which it’s performed draws out these contradictions in an interesting way.
Growing up, I played a lot of sports, and the emotional and aesthetic world of sport continues to inform my practice. Cheerleading is fascinating because it’s both a sport and an art, but often denigrated as neither.
Gray Wielebinski
Marissa, much of your practice as a DJ and producer is rooted in nightlife and club culture. How did those worlds inform the sound and atmosphere of this performance?
Marissa: When creating We Got Spirit, Gray and I wanted this iteration of the piece to reflect its locale at the apex of our own artistry. For me, the nature of The Deadhouse space being subterranean, combined with its spiritual undertone being a burial ground, inherently echoes my practices as both a musician who works in nightlife and as an astrologer. This made it so easy for me to flow with the concepts we are evoking while incorporating my usual dark, dissonant textures into the sound. It was so fun to work with the duality of the word “Spirit” and tap into the demented nature of American peppiness occurring amidst fascism and genocide alongside the supernatural interpretation of the word. In the piece, the voice of our late Cumbia queen Selena Quintanilla acts as a spectre that pops up throughout, woven into a collage of stomps, marches, and archival sound from University of Texas football games.
What excites you about presenting this piece at AGM, compared to a gallery exhibition or a club night?
Gray: In some ways, this context is a kind of middle ground between an exhibition and a club night, which is interesting for our process as collaborators. The performance is obviously more immersive than a traditional exhibition, and the atmosphere takes center stage. At the same time, because it is shorter than a club night and less centred around pleasure and escapism, we can challenge the audience by immersing them in something that will hopefully be entrancing but also perhaps a little unnerving.
Marissa, you’ve collaborated with a wide range of artists across music and performance. What felt distinctive about working with Gray and agustine on this piece?
Marissa: I think when you’re an American who has spent a significant amount of time outside of the States in their adulthood, there’s a natural kinship that can easily form; not to mention the unspoken understanding of how much pride and specificity there is to Texan culture. Upon becoming friends and artistic peers, Gray and I always were able to speak from a parallel past circumstance and engage with the absurdity of American culture from the very distinct otherness that we also sit in in the UK as queer folks who occupy the subcultural. Also Gray is a Gemini, and as someone with a Gemini rising I find collaboration so fluid and familiar with these floaty geniuses!
It was so fun to work with the duality of the word “Spirit” and tap into the demented nature of American peppiness occurring amidst facism and genocide alongside the supernatural interpretation of the word.
Manuka Honey
You’re collaborating with each other and agustine zegers for this work. What prompted this collaboration, and how did your different disciplines meet in the process?
Gray: Marissa and I are close friends and really admire each other’s work, which is really exciting when working in different disciplines. Through the difference and complementarity of our practices, we were able to take different roles in creating a world together.
The performance references the haunting Texas landscapes of your shared childhoods. How has growing up in the American South shaped your artistic language, and what does it mean to revisit those environments together now?
Gray: Speaking personally, I have a very ambivalent relationship to Texas and the South. Growing up in Dallas, I had a strong sense that I needed to leave and that the life I wanted to create for myself was elsewhere. But through that process of escape, I have become fascinated with the place I come from in all its violence and ugliness, but also thinking about the hold it still has on me and the fact that I have a responsibility not to disavow it entirely. I feel I have to represent Texas and America – not in the patriotic, nationalist sense of being a spokesman for it, but more in the aesthetic sense. I am almost compulsively drawn to “returning” to it symbolically through my work.
This performance was staged in Somerset House’s subterranean spaces. How did the site influence your process?
Gray: Subterranean spaces are a major theme in my work, and I’ve ended up staging or creating them, for example by making a bunker in my ICA show. So this time it was exciting to think about how to work with a preexisting subterranean space. A big part of this was collaborating with Agustine and Fahad through his project Dean’s Bottom to produce two new custom scents for the performance that was a pivotal element from the beginning and throughout the process of crafting the work.
I feel so grateful and lucky we were able to produce this really key part of the work that also sprung from early conversations with Marissa about intentions for the performance and what experience and effects we wanted to potentially evoke. What’s fascinating about creating a scent is that it will necessarily be blended with and distorted by its environment – whether that be the smell of the person’s body wearing perfume or, in this case, the smell of the space in which the scent is diffused. The scents we made took inspiration from the Texas landscape, but will be filtered through this dark, underground space in London.
The work is framed against “the twilight of the American empire.” How do you see the role of artists and performers in responding to this political climate?
Gray: It can be hard to know how to respond to the extremity of violence, cruelty, and chaos emanating from the US at the moment. Whatever work we make can never match the horror of reality. At the same time, because this horror is in some ways difficult to metabolize or even imagine, art can play a role in helping people make sense of it.
Gray, Somerset House Studios thrives on cross-disciplinary collaboration. What has being in residence there meant for your practice?
Gray: I love artists very deeply and feel so grateful to have so many around me, it’s one of the great joys and privileges of my life. I can struggle sometimes with how the mainstream art market can feel like it pits us against each other, generates scarcity, and messes with the value and purpose of artmaking. Being in residence at Somerset House Studios is an amazing escape from that, not only because it offers so many opportunities for collaboration and mutual, noncompetitive appreciation, but also because contexts like AGM offer another way to engage with art outside of and in conjunction with the commercial side.
Looking ahead, are there other cultural rituals or symbols you’re interested in queering, dismantling, or reimagining?
Gray: I have been doing some research into UK-based gun clubs. I’m really fascinated by the paradox of these spaces that generate community around a central object of violent weaponry, as well as their existence in a place that, unlike the US, does not have a strong relationship with guns. I also have another performance coming up in November at London Performance Studios, which will also be a collaboration with Raheel Khan and working with another amazing artist Chris Owen. It centers around deconstructing the act of performance itself through the figures of audition, repetition, and synchronization.
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