I was looking back on old files & found a few new images of a show I did in 2018. It had no press release, I remember it being on for maybe 2 days. I ended up having to take a make-shift speaker back to a squat in Bow on a bike, I crashed it maybe half a mile down the road & had to pull it from Bermondsey to Bow with my ex-partner. It took 5 hours. I had broken some elements in the speaker & had to pay 50 pounds to some middle class squat sound system chaperones. I enjoyed that very much. I remember thinking about being conned, as the party was lumped in at the last minute & occurred under the arches near the unit. I decided to write something about it, to make some sense of the event. Pigs, in there on a day like this.
I had recently returned from the United States of America, with no location to stay & no financial resources. I did not wish to return to the USA due to a mental health crisis. I was thinking of the air humidifiers in this sense of strange pink fluid, in pepto bismal commonly an over-the-counter medication containing bismuth subsalicylate, used to relieve common digestive discomforts such as heartburn, indigestion, nausea, upset stomach, and diarrhea. It became a literalisation of this notion, both within the concept of housing and largely within the complex of spaces that run as housing. Pepto-Bismol has a minty, wintergreen aroma, Chalky/Medicated notes: It also carries a distinct powdery or chemical undertone often compared to chalk, bubblegum, or antiseptics. I was curious as to the aeration of this object, itself strange and almost fluorescent pink into smell itself.
Party Politics developed during this period of deep entrenched housing instability, in an industrial area of Bermondsey, within a space that functioned partly as a gallery and partly as somewhere to live for a few people. The question of how to make an exhibition was already entangled with how to inhabit a room, where to put one’s clothing, what could be borrowed, taken, suspended overhead or stolen.
LimaZulu had previously operated from a warehouse in Manor House, its first iteration was around the corner from a space people from Leeds & the north had created. Its earlier function as a communally organised home/gallery is documented in an interview with Katie Schwab, who helped establish it. By October 2018, an exhibition listing places LimaZulu at Orion Business Park in Bermondsey & that was its second iteration understood in LIMA ZULU 2, the movement between industrial units belongs to the history of the space imo, a gallery relocating alongside domestic arrangements. When I was in the US, I lived in what felt like a cardboard box, heating (apparently) came from the floor. Floor heating. I could not locate an IKEA quick enough before the academic year started, so I slept on what felt like a 30 year old duck feather pillow & a chaise lounge.
Bermondsey itself has a long history of housing & or its industry pressing against each other, tooth to jowl. Leather tanning, hide processing & the related trades developed there over centuries; the Leather Market in 1830s, bringing the buying, selling and processing of animal skins into its organised architectural complex. Tanner Street, Leathermarket Street and Morocco Street. Now you can go & see Space Odyssey 2001 in physical, a la the White Cube. I was moving my clothes so often in bin bags, it made sense to display it in the parachute 'window' on the top floor elevation that was itself inaccessible. I left two bin bags of my clothes on the top floor, a viewing platform interior to the space itself.
Further west, Southwark Bridge, a place I often walked along & thought about since I misunderstood that God's Banker did not hang himself there but on Blackfriars. Of course. Silly me. John Rennie’s original cast-iron bridge opened in 1819, connecting Southwark with the City of London, a penny toll that remained until 1864.
Above the domestic areas, the British Army parachute(British Army LLP Parachute Canopy, 34ft, Oliver Green, H124/36, 2018) provided another kind of covering of the discrete domestic habitation post the blitz of the LASPO law introduced byMike Weatherley (1956-2021) & David Davies in 2012. Meaning the squatting laws of residential buildings were illegal, forcing many organised squatting communities into commercial units, setting the seed for the death of alternative living & the neo-liberal shithousery of Guardianships. Thanks the DUTCH.
Notting Hill Genesis is apparently a housing association formed through the merger of Notting Hill Housing & Genesis (not the band) in April 2018. Its predecessor, Notting Hill Housing, had been selected in 2014 as Southwark Council’s development partner for the Aylesbury Estate in nearby Walworth. The organisation’s own history begins with efforts to address 'poor accommodation, insecure tenancies & exorbitant rents'; its later involvement in large redevelopment programmes places that founding purpose within the financial & administrative scale of remaking neighbourhoods. What it actually does, is the opposite & effectively ensures & enshrines homelessness as the new feature of your life, if you have the displeasure of ever living in the borough of southwark council & being poor. Weep meak.
Materials stolen from surrounding Notting Hill Genesis developments entered the exhibition & became the viewing platform. It never had a title, but I gave it one belatedly in ROTTING HILL FINALE. The act of stealing from the sites, obviously inadvertently stole from the sub-contractors but since the goods themselves are on the site of development, it falls within the purview of NHG to reimburse the costs of lost goods. If they did this or not, is a question for them.
Things belonging to the production of housing were brought into a space where housing itself was being demolished, destroyed & eventually gifted to a new raft of enriched children to show bloated, corpses of the slacker variant & Pembury born statesmen accidental racists. Spin Doctor, please here now. Art Forum.
The viewing platform offered a position from which to oversee this. I was interested in its apparently benign invitation to look, how areas of London compete for that overseeing & how people will operate social darwinism with a sort of tic-like glee for the possibility of being ironic or otherwise. Inifite regress means Arcadia Missa in front of selffrigid is some auto-critique but also, great location. I think the concept of the viewing platform, its Privately Owned Public variant has become a new Ballardian concept. I am not sure of its name, but it is a type of anomie. You see what you have invested in as an optical phenomenon; the view gives possession an image before you necessarily possess anything, even if you never will own your home in this fatalistic city of the DEAD. From the platform, looking could become a rehearsal for this proto-ownership & even the drop would only do superficial harm. I remember when Beuys wanted to raise the wall by 2 inches. On reflection, I want to raise all platforms by this measurement.
Outside as Rush, Mixed (2018) a constantly running cement mixer with Rush Poppers inside, I recall spending around 30 pounds. The active ingredients in "Rush" & other cheap knock-off brands of poppers belong to a class of chemical compounds called alkyl nitrites. It is a short, rush & heady at that. I took it one evening & thought my head turned into a blood balloon. I enjoyed the idea that in order to take in the aroma you had to put your head inside a moving mixer, a sort of contract with potential fall-out. I liked to imagine the anuses of those brave enough.
Elsewhere, air humidifiers contained a strange, fluorescent pink fluid in Pepto-Bismol. It smells like weird chalk. During this time, due to the housing strain I had developed a near constant stomach pain, I had previously developed a stomach ulcer during a similar period but this was something more conceptual. I started to enjoy the sudden, convulsive pains & ease them lightly with Pepto -Bismal & Clove Oil.
Its minty, wintergreen character, the chalky or medicated notes I associated with bubblegum & antiseptics, made relief seem to have its own artificial atmosphere. I was curious about the aeration of this pink object into smell itself, how something so visibly dense and peculiar might become dispersed through a room. I saw it as a smell gift.
During my stay in the USA, I was often on Regional & London Police facebook profile pages. I often saved most of the images they put up, most of which included a period of unrelenting E-FIT's or (Electronic Facial Identification Technique) which is a racist computer-based system used by law enforcement to create digital facial composites of wanted suspects or missing individuals based on eyewitness descriptions. I was unsure whether America had clocked onto this invention, but assume somehow its law enforcements were in fact beyond this level of speculative image production, they were in fact eventual in the social death of bodies.
I was thinking often about the history of portraiture, specifically the patronage structures around which portraits took place. Increasingly I had accumulated a raft of images of faces, they sat in a folder. They themselves were like poor images, poor quality, poorly put together but lethal in their materiality. In fact, they spread paranoiac convulsions out via what was then the social media hallmark in FB. Many people commented that they knew the individuals, the named people in the comments & gave addresses. I had printed them on vinyl, stretched the face in the medial & 'softened' the edges of the image. It created something strange, like an angel's face in Renaissance painting. I did this all in the USA, detached & away from the UK. I had them printed in Detroit, on what was described to be a 'knife-proof' vinyl. It was top dollar. When I returned to the UK, I displayed them at Party Politics with baby oil, as it seemed to create this sheen & luster. It also attracted various flies & stained Rick Owens clothing.
Around this time, someone recommended red light therapy to me for isolated pains, particularly musculoskeletal pain. What stayed with me was the image of a lonely red light functioning for the room. I imagined the interior receiving the treatment, the industrial unit itself having some localised ache. Like the pink fluid, it brought the promise of bodily relief & the lonely red light, which was in fact a led warning light 12v.
During one of my evening strolls, I walked past the Financial Times HQ when it was situated on Southwark Bridge. I had thought of the God's Banker, wrongly hanging underneath & promptly wanted to steal the flag, a co-conspirator in kind ascended whilst I was on look out, removing the flag. I thought we could make a pillow out of it, or two but I am not a dab hand with materials & stitching. I decided instead to use the flag as a make-shift mop to the space, cleaning the floor, kitchen, toilet & adjacent spaces. I thought of the integrity of the flag, reminded that it should be seen & installed it high near the shutters of the space.
On the stolen NHG scaffolding I put inverted castes of politico, the vaunted faces & names that I wanted to see desecrated. I had recently read Verity Spott's We Will Bury Them, taken from Khrushchev & was written in a single 88-minute session on 29 June 2017. It was one of the most important things I had ever read. I had seen the Grenfell Towers burn the year before, it had marked repeatedly in my mind about the rampant death-cult that swilled around these people's minds, intentions & without any ramifications. I had wanted what Verity had written, to occur in a material form. I conceded that only inverted the faciality of these individuals, wrapping them in CPAP chin supports, eczema cream, whipping them, covering them in fluids & then finally having them held aloft in an industrial unit, the major concession to my mutiny of feelings. It was not enough & we are now, or I am now again in a similar circumstance to the one in 2018.
Special thanks to J.A, S.M & L.P.
Written 6/11/26
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