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Film short abstract

The residents of a public housing estate in London (UK) are threatened with the demolition of their homes as part of an urban regeneration programme. Many refuse the plan and organise against it, on the streets, in the courts of law, and in their homes.

Film synopsis

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 group of 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 instantiation 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 demolition of their homes.

Living Room is designed to be experienced individually or via a guided screening.

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Film short abstract

An ethnographic film that explores the work of repair and anticipation in Dulce, a town in the Jicarilla Apache Nation.

Film synopsis

I began filming Dulce while living and working in the town as part of a public health initiative led by Dr. Yolandra Gomez, a member of the Jicarilla Apache Nation. As I did not arrive with a film in mind, the project grew out of observing people navigate their daily lives in proximity to interventions from various individuals and institutions.

The film unfolds around these acts: searching for plants that are no longer where they once were, revisiting a childhood home after decades of disrepair, trying to fix a truck that cannot be fixed. To me, these gestures do not come across as failure, but as ways of staying in relation to land, memory, and ultimately one another. I was interested in feelings of an unstable present, between what is remembered and what is anticipated, and how repair becomes a way of negotiating these tensions.

The presence of the Mormon Church in the film reflects a way of imagining help and intervention that follows different sensibilities — more linear and assured forms of coming to oneself.