Let’s Make It Faster
Let’s Make It Faster
Showing at MIMA from 14 Mar – 5 Oct 2025
Commissioned by Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Winter 2024/25
Two-screen film and gallery installation, 2025
‘Let’s make it faster’ invites viewers into a space where the rigidity of the adult world is gently suspended, allowing a delicate interplay between internal dreams and external expectations. Over the course of 4 winter months, Webb-Ellis collaborated with young people in Middlesbrough through established local youth programmes to make a new film and installation. Through tender conversation, paintings, ritual, dance and music, the young collaborators in this film reveal fragments of their inner worlds. Their art becomes a living journal, a message in a bottle – documenting the struggle towards personal and political agency.
On the front lines of change, young people are uniquely placed to reflect on the complexities of what it means to grow up in this moment, in a town also undergoing profound reinvention, and grappling with the aftermath of recent racist riots. At its core, the work is a dialogue with our collective present – a reflection on how early experiences shape a fluid, ever-evolving self, even as societal pressures and the relentless pace of technology and capitalism urge conformity.
‘Let’s make it faster’ is both a time capsule and a call to reimagine our future. It asks us: what will we hold onto? Which ideas and voices will light our way as we move into uncharted territories? The hopes and fears of these young people chart a course through uncertainty, creativity, and the resilient pulse of youth.
