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Contribution short abstract

Living Room is a multimodal, interactive online documentary featuring the residents of a modernist London public housing estate under demolition who refuse the dispossession and social cleansing wrought by the regeneration programme.

Contribution long abstract

Living Room is a multimodal, interactive online documentary (I-doc) which was created as part of my anthropological doctoral research into the demolition of a modernist public housing estate in London. The I-doc foregrounds the analyses, experiences and activism of those working-class, racialised residents who refuse the demolition assemblage. It asks: how is everyday life made and re-made within and despite the structural violence of demolition, and the attendant dispossession, social cleansing and gentrification it engenders? How do residents assert their rights to home, community and the city, and refuse any predetermined outcomes? Living Room offers the user the choice to experience any of the 5 main thematic strands in the order they wish. Each strand represents one instantiations of the demolition assemblage, understood as a bundle of processes, materials, temporalities, and discourses. Legal proceedings, housing occupations, modernist architectural forms, the media, and everyday practices of homemaking are all options presented in an iterative, non-linear fashion via videos, collage, and audio. The form of the i-doc reflects both the open-ended and uncertain nature of the demolition and gives space to residents’ refusal of the un-commoning of their homes.

Living Room requires a computer, screen (minimum size: 14 inch laptop), a mouse, headphones and a stable internet connection. It is designed to be experienced individually. The full experience can take up to 1 hour, but this is at the discretion of the user.

www.livingroomidoc.com

username: livingroom password: Building80