Spectres of Modernism: Art Against Overdevelopment
Have you ever seen a 'ghost home' and would you want to live
near one?
Following on from my last blog regarding Soho, London, and strategically if not ironically timed to coincide with this year's Frieze Art Fair, I believe the following
will be of interest to many of my readers.
Fellow artist and friend, Stewart Home, along with a stellar
ensemble, including Iain Sinclair, Jeremy Deller, Fiona Banner, Gavin Turk and
many other leading British artists and writers associated with 'Artists Against
Overdevelopment,' is participating in the multi-staged exhibit/cultural
demonstration, 'Spectres of Modernism: Art Against Overdevelopment,' now taking
place in East Central London.
Curated by Fraser Muggeridge Studio, the group has created
and assembled a display of brightly coloured protest banners displayed along
the balconies of Bowater House and designed to call attention to the appalling
and regrettably ongoing gentrification of London.
According to the group, at issue here, if not a global problem, is the very real concern
that housing developers continue to gobble up neighbourhood city real estate to build
luxury apartments designed to cater to buy-to-leave investors - a familiar scenario to those of us in California since the 80's, where the
divide between displaced locals and interlopers has never been more glaringly apparent than in the area known as Silicon Valley, where residents sharing their communities with uninhabited ghost homes purchased solely for investment value continue to blight
the city landscape.
At the heart of the group's current focus in London, however, is one
of Britain's largest home builders, Taylor Wimpey, who among others, they claim
are designing complexes solely for inflated sale to foreign investors, often enticed
by fraudulent or trumped up descriptions of the locations of these proposed complexes, resulting in the creation of more non-resident owned ghost homes.
The larger problem, however, seems to be that not
only are these neighbourhoods not development-friendly, high-end, urban real
estate surrounded by 'luxury retail shops,' but rather historic and working class communities where many
of the aforementioned artists and their families continue to live, work and attend school, as they have done for several generations.
The group is seeking support and public awareness of this
issue. If you would like to learn more
about the exhibit, which runs through 10 December, or how you can help their current efforts to quell Taylor
Wimpey's 'The Denizen' Golden Lane Ghost Home, rather…'Luxury Apartment Complex,' please check out:
https://www.change.org/p/save-golden-lane-estate-and-build-decent-homes.
https://denizenec1.wordpress.com/
It doesn't take but a cursory understanding of these issues
to realise that gentrification is not just a benign sign of
urban renewal, but rather a polarising and
disenfranchising form
of segregation.
Billboard - Canary Wharf (Banksy)
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