Output details

Bonnington Square

This short film documents the evolution of a squatted community in the heart of London from the early 1980s into the model of an urban sustainable community that it is today. Through this the film enacts an excavation of memory of the squatting movement in London, whose traces have been effectively vaporised from the public sphere, as there is little recorded documentation of its existence.

The documentary process revealed how the squatters initiated action around environmental issues such as recycling, urban regeneration, food waste and urban gardening. It went on to explore how the memory of a transient community as it existed thirty years ago could be restored in narrative form. This entailed researching still photographs taken from twelve different photographers who were living in Bonnington Square at the time. Over 600 photographs, all of them predigital, were gathered and then reassembled into a multiperspectival narrative assemblage to describe the memory of the community.

The architectural location of Bonnington Square was also recreated by stitching together and degrading modern day digital photographs to create an animated sequence in After Effects as a transitional device to represent collective memory. These visual elements were then combined with oral testimony to reveal the community’s early engagement with issues of sustainability in an inner city environment.

The film has had multiple festival screenings including; Hawaii, Slovakia, Berlin, and New Zealand, as well as at London and Edinburgh Documentary Festivals (January-June 2012) and has been used as an agenda catalyst in various architectural, community development and sustainability forums (2012), including at the Royal College of Art, the Lambeth Archives open day, the Neighbourhood Renewal Conference at the University of Westminster, UWE’s Institute of Sustainability, the Architectural Film Festival in Lisbon (September 2013), and at the Festival of Neighbourhood in the Royal Festival Hall, London (2013).