More United Than Divided is a new ambitious social practice artwork by YARA + DAVINA in partnership with the National Trust (2020-2022), and touring to The National Football Museum in Autumn 2022.

In 2019 the National Trust commissioned us to create a national, large-scale social practice artwork originally titled Kick Off exploring craft and collectivism within women's football with a focus on feminism both historically in terms of the suffragettes and now in terms of equality within sports and how that can influence the wider world. Ultimately the artwork explores how women’s football has been a feminist act since its birth and ask questions about what new roles it is playing now in terms of equality that go wider than gender.

Over the last 2 years we have been working with 2 local young female football teams (14-16) and other local women over at 2 National Trust Sites (Souter and the Leas, Sunderland and Osterley House and Park, London). Pre-pandemic we were invited to co-create the teams visual and aural language, asking the women and young girls what impassions them and what they stand for. We planned to collaboratively design the team scarves, pies, pin badges and chants (a form of empowering spoken word!), culminating in two large scale matches in the north and south. We developed these ideas when we started researching the history of female football during WW1 and the connections with the suffragette movement, in relation to the National Trust site of Souter. 

"Football has been hand in hand with women's struggle for equality for hundreds of years. How women's teams used it to further their suffrage cause in the 1800-1900s and how even now, space and platforming for women's football highlights how women still face so many barriers and challenges in modern society.” 

Playwright Sabriana Mahfouz 

More United Than Divided uses football as a powerful vehicle and accessible entry point to engage with wider issues of equality, inclusivity and health and has the potential to stimulate social change, where community is at the heart of both social practice art and football.

Responding to Covid restrictions we restarted Kick Off in Autumn of 2021, and have developed 2 table footballs, in which our community groups, the wider public and our 2 football teams selected who the female players are, who they trust to be on their teams, to talk about female collectivity and unity in action. 

At the start of the Women’s Euros we launch with our incredibly timely More United Than Divided scarves and pin badges, in a time when some of us are more divided than united. As Jo Cox said in her maiden speech in Parliament "We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us."

You can buy a scarf, and wear this positive mantra of unity and togetherness, here.

More United Than Divided is publicly funded by the Arts Council England and The National Trust.