MON 20 MAY 2024
Monday 20 May 2024
This is a time of blossoming. And visits. We’re getting into a rhythm as we share learning from the POWER STATION both online and in the space. Part of that learning is building networks of mutual support, education and care and this week we’re filled with excitement about hosting the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination – Isabel and Jay are in London – leaving ZAD (Zone to Defend) de Notre Dame des Landes to come to this street after ‘deserting the city’ - as they write in ‘We Are Nature Defending Itself: Entangled Art, Activism and Autonomous zones.’ There’s a lot on before their arrival. The studios are busy as Kristin hosts a planning session for the rain garden enterprise with young people from Project Zero and Poppy continues her work on making visible and interactive the mycorrhizal networks beneath our feet. This place used to house the spectacular process of mushroom growing and it seems an apt analogy to the way this space networks and communicates to its neighbours near and far - committed to creating a sustainable and flourishing future now.
Our now long-term collaborating economist Ann Pettifor has been running online sessions as part of the POWER STATION for the last year – sharing knowledge of system change and expanding the case for the Green New Deal. Today she is here. She’d been sceptical about us when we persisted in reaching out to her during our Bank Job. Artists? Rebel Bank? What could this contribute to economic justice and education? But she came and a tour of the space persuaded her – the buzz of making, the banknotes drying, the vats full of mashed up recalled currency from the Bank of England’s Debden depot. She is a key interviewee in the Bank Job film and the Power film in progress and a crucial influence in the economics underpinning our work. She provides the macro vision and knowledge to our micro action and recognises the power in the hyper local reaching out to impact wider thinking and action. She’s in demand and the day involves vodcast recording and filming on the street talking the function of money and global finance systems. We know this all too well from the daily work we do – the narratives of our economic system hold so much back – they cost us the earth. These streets under the thrall and rule of the financial towers of the city seen from the terraced rooftops.
We open the doors for the evening book club. This too began online in deepest lockdown – our first writer Ashley Dawson - author of ‘People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons’ – making the case that we can’t replicate the monopolies of the fossil fuel era in this urgent energy transition. Amid a wider argument for energy democracy he writes of projects like Detroit’s ‘Soularity’ - a grass roots people powered project highlighting the inequity and racism at the heart of urban planning and governance and tackling this by repossessing street lighting – taking power, community safety and resilience into their own hands. The book club has become a vibrant event and we’re building up the programme with a attendees coming from literally next door and across London. Behind Ann as she talks of carbon budgets and an ecological economics, the main studio space is filled with chimney pots – an alternative to Gormley’s famous ‘Field’ where experiments with soot and image transfer are in process – a result of a communal salvage and reuse operation increasing direct sunlight on the solar panels above whilst repurposing and reimagining the artefacts of fossil capitalism.
From the archive
Mon 22 May 2023
Sunday was a day of rest. Or really just nausea and dizziness. Embarrassingly I think I have gone and got heatstroke from yesterday’s digging and dehydration. I ‘m hoping no one knocks on the door as when I walk it feels like my head is floating separately. I lean into this. Using the chance to catch up on writing. I hear snippets of passing conversation. POWER STATION posters previously elicit things like ‘what’s that then?’ and then discussion of ‘solar power’, of ‘whole street’ before voices become inaudible. The worst being ‘Just two artists making a film about themselves.’ I told Natalie about that one and she’s straight in with her American view on the very worst of British privilege – the easy and damning dismissal of things they don’t or don’t want to understand. Spreading doubt in others. Now it’s the sunflowers. A little boy says ‘Daddy look! Sunflowers. Sunflowers. They’re growing really well but they haven’t flowered. Yet.’ The yet is the big thing. Will any flower by 15 July? I don’t know. Does it matter. Yes. And no. The very act of growing and plans for harvesting are opening up new connections and collaborations and bringing joy in the process. Through the window I see Dan and George walking the dogs straight down the middle of the street with a swagger. I love them.
The urgent need of pots and of money enters my dreams. There are millions of unwanted pots in the world it’s just a matter of getting hold of them. There are millions of pounds in the world – it’s just a matter of getting hold of some of them. Both needs are urgent.
Monday is full of these hunts. Emails to see who will share the campaign. Emails to see who might have pots. Emails about compost and solar plans. But as I get to the school gates I see the need for water is more urgent. A sunny weekend has left the sunflowers at the school parched and I take up the hose hopefully. They need bigger pots and new compost.
Hope is tiring. One minute believing we’ll make it and secure the building. The next not so sure. We walk up the road – Dan with camera, me in space helmet holding typewriter and take photographs that attempt to illustrate this time travelling writing expedition I am on, through the doors and into the future of that space. The uneasy feeling at the pit of the stomach seeing people coming for viewings reminds me of the Bank – the determination to be able to stay and grow that space as a site of making, thinking and coming together to act on the crises of the time. The crushing disappointment in the failure to do that.
The children laugh when I grab a pen to write down a quote from the Harry Potter film they’re watching- ‘Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end’ (Luna Lovegood). I’m hoping that might be in the form of the space up the road.
