Art and Gentrification. Do artists create great adverts for property developers?
May 29, 2pm-3.30pm
Peckham Liberal Club
24 Elm Grove, London SE15 5DE
Speakers: People's Republic of Southwark, Jen Harvie, Lottie Child, Eileen Conn
It starts with a community, then the cheap spaces are occupied by artists and before you know it your neighborhood is full of hipsters, sour dough and flat white coffees! However, many economists have observed that the flat white economy has brought much needed rejuvenation to many neglected areas of our city. This panel will discuss the complexities of operating in a cultural field that is often seen as a forerunner to gentrification and the ways that they negotiate this within their practices.
LOTTIE CHILD / Artist
Child constructs situations that defy the traditional context of museum and gallery environments, focusing on behaviour in urban places. For the last ten years she has been developing her practice of Street Training, a form of extended research and performative intervention. Through Street Training, she explores how we use public space in creative, playful and sometimes subversive ways. She often apprentices herself to children and young people for their skills in seeing opportunities for creativity and boundary pushing. Street Training has enabled Southwark teenagers to train local police to tell the difference between creative and anti-social behaviour. She lead a group of Venetian children in training planners and architects as part of the program of the British Pavilion at the Venice Beinnale 2010. She is a lecturer at the University of the Arts, exhibits internationally has shown with Tate Britain, the ICA and received the British Council Brazil Links award.
JEN HARVIE / Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at Queen Mary, University of London
Harvie comes from Toronto and has studied in Montreal and Glasgow. She has been based in London since 1994. Her work investigates the cultural politics of contemporary performance and art. Her most recent monograph, Fair Play – Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), asks how contemporary art and performance in the UK both capitulate to and resist neoliberal capitalist ideologies. It grounds this question in four material contexts: labour relationships; cultural policy; public and private arts funding; and public and private urban space, with special focus on neoliberal ‘creative cities’ agendas, pop-ups, current housing policies, and gentrification. The book asks what effects participation in contemporary art and performance has in contemporary culture, in particular, whether it enhances democracy or contributes to neoliberal capitalism. Harvie is also author of Theatre & the City (2009) and The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (2nd ed. 2014). She is co-editor of the Palgrave Macmillan series Theatre & and of special issues of Contemporary Theatre Review on ‘Theatre and Globalization’ (2006) and ‘The Cultural Politics of London 2012’ (2013). With Split Britches co-founder and QMUL colleague Lois Weaver, she is currently co-editing and co-writing The Only Way Home Is Through the Show: Performance Work of Lois Weaver (forthcoming from Intellect/LADA).
sed.qmul.ac.uk/staff/harviej.html
PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF SOUTHWARK / Community Activists
People’s Republic of Southwark was set up in April 2008, with the aim of sharing information about the many inspiring things residents and community groups were doing around the borough in order to improve community cohesion. In August 2008, we held the first Southwark Freecycle event, and, for the following 12 months, ran free monthly events in different parts of Southwark. The events comprised of swap shop, seed swap, info share stalls and a range of art and hands-on activities developed in collaboration with the venue hosts. The events were well attended and provided residents with a unique opportunity to network and learn. One of our events featured in a French/German TV programme. We also produced two radio programmes about local issues for Resonance FM. In 2010, we fostered the development of the Southwark Planning Network, a loose network of community activists and community groups interested in local planning issues. The network leveraged support from Planning Aid for London and worked closely together for six months on local strategic policy documents (including the Southwark Core Strategy) helping to foster a number of areas of identified common ground between the council and community groups. The network now continues to operate mainly in electronic (online) form. Earlier this year, People’s Republic of Southwark was one of the groups who received an award from the Mayor of Southwark, in recognition of our contribution to the local community.
EILEEN CONN / Co-ordinator of Peckham Vision
Peckham Vision is a local network of individuals who have an interest in Peckham town centre. Its main aim is to create ways citizens become well informed to take effective action to shape their neighbourhood. It grew out of a local campaign to review the decision to designate a 6 acre site in Peckham town centre for demolition and use as a tram depot. We campaigned from 2005 to 2009 publicising the potential of the site for small businesses especially arts, creative makers and cultural enterprises, and named the site as the Copeland Cultural Quarter. The designation for demolition was eventually lifted. These collective citizens' actions have been instrumental in spotting potential in old buildings for creative, arts and cultural uses and, exercising citizens' rights, have influenced how the Council's Plans relate to the sites and their activities, but so far with mixed results. They have also coincided with rising Peckham property prices and rents that are having dramatic effects on Peckham's demographics and local economy as a commercial centre.