tues 14 may 2024

TUES 14 MAY 2024

Hailstones beat down on street and car rooftops. Weather that might once have been called ‘unseasonable’ is now commonplace. On local gardening forums people report losing the last of their palms to a cold wet winter in the same sentence as preparing planting schemes for dryer zones. Extreme is the word. We gather ice as big as peas, exhilarated but disconcerted.

There’s the same air of excitement in the POWER HOUSE as I walk in to a session where Organic Lea are working with young people from Project Zero and others in the area on building rain garden planters in the yard. Kristin has taken a studio here and is leading this. It’s taken persistence on everyone’s part to even get to this point as we all feel our way into collaborations and what’s best for each organisation’s mission. We all want to work together but we’ve also been overstretched and underfunded. Steve is a local hero – on our banknotes, on murals, at King’s garden parties. He’s committed to the young people he works with and the strain is constant as knife crime doesn’t get to the ‘Zero’ they aim for in their name and the need for their work only increases. All they do is about a route to some sort of prosperity– the potential of a life free from poverty and pressures. Often it’s the corporations that offer a way in and out – social responsibilities ticked by fast track training to ‘good’ jobs. It shouldn’t be a challenge and in fact it’s a necessity for the shift to fast-track education and employment for a prospering people and planet. Green technology and construction training and apprenticeships are one avenue. Now we can offer space and structure, this collaboration – setting up a social enterprise business led by the young people to make and market the rain gardens to local streets is already gaining traction - the winter flash floods making the best argument for demand. A few early adopters have trialled them and now many more are signing up. All of this works with the growing ‘street by street’ approach to neighbourhood and wider transformation the POWER STATION forwards – rather than focusing on disparate sites where eco actions are often led by income levels and housing tenure, the aim is always to do all possible in every way to involve all.

I think of Audre Lorde ‘Poetry is Not a Luxury’. I wish I ‘d read it last year in that strange time of doubts. Instead it was sunflowers that supported me. Needing to, having to, care for them meant carrying on. I suppose I should have said children here but that seems a deep given and giving, a labour and nourishment at once separate and embedded. Plus they’ve always resisted the work. Saying they can’t stand it whilst having fun stamping coins out of exploded van. They’re actually excited about current plans – another work of destructive magic involving ceramics and imagery of fossil capitalism that will be both artwork and the POWER STATION feature documentary film’s closing credits.  This place holds all this. This place is poetry and this place is not a luxury: “we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions our dreams imply and some of our old ideas disparage.” (Lorde) Perhaps we should have written that in the FAQs we attempted to answer and challenge.

Could we be doing all this now without this space? Probably. Maybe. Perhaps not. There is a sense of exhaustion that builds and won’t go away. The ‘burnout’ common in activist circles. The love and rage of the Extinction Rebellion turned in on itself. The despair that sets in at times wondering what more you have to do to prove ‘impact’ and ‘value.’ Too many ‘computer/council/bank says no.’

This space is a space to breath – for us, for the street and for everyone who enters. I think it always has been. So many people have been through the doors since Spike and Rosie set it up as Walden Studios and then Wyn Works studios took it over. Friends who grew up on nearby streets say that entering the then blue doors literally changed their life. Places that give space to community and art have that power.  It made local headlines with its bespoke knife making and mushroom growing but there were no headlines when they quietly moved out and the ‘For Sale’ sign arrived. ‘That’s just the way it goes’ – seems to be the common refrain. When we didn’t manage to secure the bank, still sitting empty over 3 years later, metal grills facing the high street, it felt like after all our exploding debt as a big ‘F you’ to the forces of capitalism made visible in Canary Wharf’s towers, those forces returned to say ‘get back in your box.’  This time it wasn’t easy. It felt like we weren’t going to make it at times. We felt like giving up. I remember Dan saying – we mustn’t be ashamed if we don’t make it. I hadn’t thought of being ashamed. Just tired.

Now I lay out the gathered images of local infrastructure – from street explorations on a treasure hunt geotagging chimney pots, substations, gas hole covers and pylons alongside solar panels and heat pumps. The task now is to develop this as a working app/trail of the area that triggers knowledge of past, present and future energy infrastructure and transformation. We’re working with a local AR expert and keen collaborators from Project Zero. This has been a long time developing – a way of bringing the material and digital, together. Different working groups collect local history recordings, explore photographic and film archives, map and reanimate these in an overlooked story of power. Later in the month we’ll be taking a trip to the National Grid and National Gas archives with an intergenerational group of residents. This all began in a conversation. Talking to 100 year old Dorothy who has lived on the street all her life about how she remembered electricity first arriving in the 1930s. Delving into the local archives and unearthing civic pride in ‘Walthamstow’s Electricity Undertaking.’  Through all this multi layered collaborative work we aim to build that same sense of a civic future – a connection and pride in people in their community and an education and say in the infrastructure that surrounds us.

There is an almost electric buzz in the air as people pour over archive material and begin to see how this comes to life as a living map of the area. We’re all exhausted by the end of the session but sit back and watch some of the test edits of the archive material projected -  taking notes on a wall of massive paper sheets used to plot the findings and connections made in each session.  We’ve revived some of our former supplier relationships built when we hosted events at the bank – cold beers and sodas from local makers.  The projector is set up to screen onto the large garage doors- a dream of ours to host screenings in the style of Michel Gondry’s film ‘Be Kind Rewind’ where a community in Passaic, New Jersey come together to not only ‘Swede’ (recreate/make in a DIY way) famous films accidentally deleted from VHS by a magnetised Jack Black but to save the building from demolition. The final scene shows a street full of people watching themselves in all their co made creativity and absurdity.

Co creation leads the work we do here.  This space has a legacy of regular and diverse workshops from pottery to life drawing, botanical print, text and textiles. These continue but our core work is focused on an art production that engages directly with the challenges of our time and doesn’t exist in a silo. It is an invitation to participation. It is not a compromise. It is visionary and encourages other visions. The space is on a circuit of precious making and creating space in the borough that prides itself on a legacy of William Morris yet does little to support the culture that embodies his core principles – useful work versus useless toil -  influenced by anarchism and addressing issues of inequality and precarity.

We water the plants. Other artists are working late. No evidence of hail remains as we close the doors and walk over the familiar cobbles. Magpies nest noisily in the tree outside.  

From the archive

Tues 16 May 2023

George wakes and says ‘It’s blue.’ He gazes up, willing clear skies all day. I explain that it can’t always be blue as there’d be no life without clouds and rain -  all too aware internally of news of Spanish droughts - low reservoirs, exposed churches, failing crops. I tease him and do an apparently very good impression of what Eeyore might sound like in the morning.  If I was to write a journal of what I do in this day I would write ‘I ‘m sitting down writing a journal.’ Aware of a long list of practical actions that need actioning. But maybe I’m not really here as I attempt to write about this day one year in the future. I tell the children it’s an exercise in expanding the space-time continuum.  Back to the Future. Quantum Leap. Flight of the Navigator – all the favourites that put a time frame on me.

It's easy to write about the everyday, seemingly mundane detail - less easy to imagine where we are as a society and a planet but perhaps the details and the specificities are where hope lies. Natalie says’ it’s one year ahead – things won’t have collapsed too much’ and there’s an awkward, thoughtful, hopeful pause. My futile grab bag is evidence that I might not be so sure. And yet – we carry on. There is no other choice. And that’s sometimes the terrifying thing. We call this a solar punk experiment. Solar punk is a speculative literary and artistic movement envisioning and working towards a sustainable future. It is a way of imagining and making manifest. I try to imagine what this future looks like - what does it feel like? and it reminds me of a recent session of the Civic Futures Fellowship I am part of where we were asked to describe our current inquiry or project (in my case – building the POWER STATION)  - what kind of animal, what would it taste like? What would it smell like? What would it feel like? What would it sound like?

It is a starling murmuration.

It is explosive.

It is intoxicating.

It is contagious.

It is jubilant.

Today the sunflowers are doing well. I think. I hope they bring some joy to children and parents as they walk past and check on them daily. Sipke shares a phone picture of his amazing avocado plant along with news of ongoing slug and snail sunflower decimation. Yesterday as we planned the school’s involvement in SUN DANCE talking masks and music we joked perhaps it should be a festival of the slug. Did I dress as a snail for school fancy dress once? Maybe but it was being a fuchsia flower that no one got but I thought was brilliant that I remember more vividly. My Mum’s large purple full briefs stuffed with tights under my red skirted leotard. A flower of white-washed, wind swept islands.  On the pavement outside, Alison shares the information on the Foundation for Future London grant and I panic at just how many applications I need to write. The spreadsheet I keep has more in the ‘no’ column than ‘yes’ but we keep going with them and they keep us going. Recent ‘yeses’ from Lush and London Community Energy Fund see us through this patch where so much has been adjusting and advancing behind the scenes.

Natalie comes around with some major drive issues to sort and tells us the ‘For Sale’ sign has gone up. It’s not a surprise but my stomach and mood sinks and finds it hard to rise again.  I refresh the community share offer page. I refresh the page. I refresh the page. I am unrefreshed.  I email Community Energy England, reply to the local newspaper, look for other ways of sharing the share offer. As we work through funding bids with new input and guidance from some experts I think about ‘hard to reach audiences’ and feel that that the hardest to reach audiences are a comfortable middle where deep conservatism attempts a liberal disguise. The bourgeoisie is alive and not well. Scared and self limiting. Rob Hopkin’s expansive podcast accompanies these considerations. His question in this session is ‘What If Imagination were a universal right?.’ He talks to Masum Momaya and Ariane Conrad. They discuss how society and education have trained us well how to critique and dismantle, to see and share all that is wrong -  but not how to imagine and make better. Sounds about right. I press pause and run out…

School pick up ends up in a watering sunflower session as a form of therapy for Kristin to calm down from a toxic meeting with council parks officer about compost. Her daughter and friend help repot and hold the hose, discovering ladybirds in resident and waving goodbye to homeward bound teachers. When they set off for the park I sit on a plastic mushroom/scooter store waiting for Sandra to deliver a load of 500 sunflowers. I look like an anxious gnome as the last parents arrive for after school club pickup at 6pm and still the electric van isn’t here.  

At the final possible moment Sandra turns up and we race to unload crates of plants and position them in our cordoned off sunflower nursery. I ‘m not sure what we would have done without the school saying yes.

 Saying goodnight to rather too busy children E shows me her new nail varnish and offers to put it on me. I look down at my hands with nails of earth and say ‘no thank you -my hands don’t really suit nail varnish but thank you!’ If it’s not mud, it’s coal dust or photographic chemicals or ink or glue. I love my hands. Imperfect, far from glamourous. I love the filmmaker Agnes Varda loving her hands as they age, examining and cherishing them in all their lines and strength. Lying in the pile of clothes, I get a surprise call from the judge of ‘London in Bloom’. I entered on a whim thinking it would help galvanise people and maybe bring a sense of pride and community. I apologise I hadn’t replied to their email. The judging date is a month before the SUN DANCE event and most likely before any kind of flowering. He says he’ll be able to see the potential. Let’s see how that goes.

I attempt to write a list for a tonight that drifts into a tomorrow.