A screening of artist films and experimental cinema, followed by a renters rights quiz at the bar!
The London Renters Union is a member-led campaigning union taking grassroots action to transform the housing system and win homes for people, not profit. Londoners face the highest rents in Europe. Many of us live with the threat of eviction or in unsafe housing. Our rigged housing system, in favour of landlords and investors, is making our city more unequal. When we organise together, we are powerful: we support each other, stand up to landlords and win lower rents, longer tenancies and better housing for everyone.
The event is free for members, with .the option to sign up at the door or admission for a small donation (£3min), which goes towards London Renters Union and DIY space.
Home Movies Programme:
This selection of artists’ film and video explores issues of changing living situations; what and does not constitute home; communalism to private home gyms. This is the first in a series of collaborative events between LUX and London Renters Union, curated by Alice Lea. The programme includes work from the LUX collection.
Hackney Marshes (TV Version), John Smith. 1978, 30mins, 16mm transferred to HD video, colour, sound.
“Explicitly challenging all the accepted forms of the TV documentary, John Smith’s important film is extraordinary as the product of a major institution. The dual subjects are the inhabitants of tower blocks in Hackney and the components and conventions of film-making. Interviews with the former are edited against a limited sequence of compositions which illustrate and question the soundtrack in distinct ways. Repetition, sharp editing, unlikely images (chalk lines, lift doors closing) and the deliberate reversal of normal devices work to disorientate the viewer and to force a reconsideration of their relationship to the film. The overall result is perhaps surprisingly, given the theoretical concerns, a strangely intimate picture of the subjects. Importantly, its success demonstrates the necessity for many TV film-makers to re-think their safe approaches and accepted techniques.” John Wyver, Time Out, 1978.
Warm Bath, Lucy Clout. 2016, 11 mins, HD video, colour, sound.
‘Warm Bath’ is a home movie. It is a looping fiction telling two interlocking stories. The first, a group of seven women, each obsessed with the movement of water within their shared, UPVC and mildew, North London house. The second, a man who films a particular drainage ditch twice a day, every day, in the sunny Southern Californian endoergic basin. The video begins as an investigation into the desire to record the unremarkable passing of time and becomes a looking-based experiment in permanence, place, leaky systems and intimacy. ‘Warm Bath’ documents structures by which people maintain themselves – physically, socially and via repetition/routine. We see the prosaic economic relationship that is a house-share: necessarily impermanent, a place of continual constructional negotiation. It’s a practical, provisional agreement between themselves: a structure that functionally understands it’s own instability. Through the nauseating repetitive movement of the individual hand, the work shows one-sided stories of comfort, attachment and joining in. lucy clout
Basement Pool, George Barber. 2016, 3 mins, HD video, colour, sound.
George Barber responds to a frequent nuisance in the richer areas of London as people dig down under their houses.
Street 66, Ayo Akingbade. 2018, 13mins, HD video, colour, sound.
Chronicling the life of Ghanaian housing activist Dora Boatemah and her influence on the regeneration of Angell Town Estate in Brixton, South London. Dr. Theodora Boatemah MBE was born in Kumasi, Ghana in 1957, where her mother worked in President Kwame Nkrumah’s cabinet. In 1987, she founded the Angell Town Community Project and campaigned for the community-controlled regeneration of the Angell Town Estate in Brixton. Dora was awarded an MBE in 1994 for services to the community in Brixton and received an honorary doctorate from Oxford Brookes University in 1996. Dora died in 2001 at the age of 43.
DIY Space for London is a totally independent volunteer-run social centre and event venue runas a members’ club. But don’t worry! If you are not currently a member you can be signed in asa guest of the promoter. Membership is open to all and only costs £2 per year. You can joinquickly online at: http://diyspaceforlondon.org/join email: [email protected] if youhave any questions
