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Contribution short abstract

This contribution takes the multimodal, interactive online documentary (i-doc) Living Room as a starting point to discuss the potentials and risks of producing i-docs as part of anthropological research. Living Room is on display at the Out of Focus exhibition.

Contribution long abstract

Living Room is a multimodal, interactive online documentary (i-doc) which was created as part of my doctoral research into the demolition of a modernist public housing estate in London. The i-doc features the analyses, experiences and organising of those working-class, racialised residents who refuse the demolition assemblage. It asks how everyday life is made and re-made within and despite the structural violence of demolition, and the attendant dispossession, social cleansing and gentrification it engenders. Living Room offers the user the choice to experience any of the 5 main thematic strands in the order they wish. 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 the open-ended and uncertain nature of the demolition and foregrounds residents’ refusal of the loss of home. In my contribution I will discuss the affordances for anthropological research of the site’s architecture and of the absence of a linear narrative.