While history too often remembers wars through military narratives that emphasize notions of victory and territory, the everyday lives of individuals during armed conflicts are overlooked. Among them are the women known as Mesdames Tirailleurs, companions, wives, and relatives of West and North African soldiers deployed by the French empire during the First and Second World Wars. These women crossed unfamiliar landscapes, cared for the wounded, acted as translators, carried supplies and, beyond practical labour, sustained relationships and dignity amid deeply precarious conditions. Yet their names rarely appear in official records of the time. 

Mesdames Tirailleurs amplifies the voices of the descendants who continue to call for remembrance and reparations. The artist and activist Matilda TheeGreat’s work invokes the experiences of her grandfather, Ben Makgate Cpl. N4379, a Tirailleur from South Africa, and the erased experiences of African soldiers captured after the Siege of Tobruk in 1942. Many of them were executed, while others died later during the brutal ‘Walk of Death’ across Europe in 1943. Drawing on her grandfather’s diary, the artist’s performance seeks to honour lives and sacrifices long excluded from dominant historical narratives. 

Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s idea of ‘critical fabulation’, the event brings together poetry, performance, and speculative storytelling to attend to these silences, with particular emphasis on the perspectives of women. Audience members are invited to move through HKW together with the performer, passing into the exhibition spaces as voices and memories unfold in dialogue with the works on display.