London is a city where international capital returns to roost. Within sight of the radiant behemoths of the financial sector, some of the most deprived communities in the country gaze upon the materialised excretions of the money market. But a metropolis containing this contrast of fortunes inevitably produces its discontents. And while the forces of finance capital place ever-greater demands on our space, time, budgets–leaving scant resources to conspire against them–these circumstances simultaneously produce a deepening urgency to move towards their abolition.
Where indoor spaces might once have welcomed assembly–a starting point to pursue other political demands–this crisis means for many, the focus now rests on attaining the space itself. Since 2008, the increasing velocity with which capital has sunk investment into real estate has deepened a housing crisis across the city. The turn towards a rentier economy, and increasing class divide determined solely by the property relation one has towards their home have immiserated countless lives. But conversely, the desperation of these conditions present a kernel of possibility in their politicisation of masses of renters and council tenants at the sharp end of this relation.
Meanwhile, the agents of ‘improvement’ progressively abolish the spaces where one can remain unsurveilled and to opt-out of the logics of exchange: the dingy industrial lanes, the safehouses, the squats, the social centres. Walk down Railton Road in Brixton, and a blue plaque at 121 emphatically delineates the past from the present. This building was the site of one of London’s longest running squats: first by Olive Morris in 1973, with an anarchist social centre later occupying the site from 1981-1999. Whilst being a locus for many radical cultural and political activities over this time, it could be said that the forces of the property market were the council’s principal motivation for its eventual eviction, seeking to thwart the ‘adverse possession’ clause at the eleventh hour which would have seen the building’s ownership bestowed upon its occupants.
We hope to tease out a materialist understanding of the substrate underlying different phases of radical thought and action, to uncover the interface between the affective, subjective experiences of frustration and mobilisation against the given, with the mechanics under the hood that both contribute to a consciousness to precipitate these conflicts, and the resources to sustain them over time. Therefore moralistic reflections around the shifting intensities of political action might be reevaluated through parameters set by changing circumstances: after all, the ability for 1970s radicals to easily procure a whole townhouse–from which they ran militant cadres, libraries, women’s centres, communal kitchens, and so on–might not speak to a difference in political ambition between the generations. And while gentrification discourse mostly focuses on the outdoor and visible from the street - what of the way the city has shifted to engender different modes of relation indoors - those of the intramural, the socially reproductive, and the clandestine?
With the decline of its empire, and the rise of the financial sector, London maintains a certain position as a central node in the global economy. It’s the stakes of this, as being a potential choke point for the circulation of capital, that makes the imperative for organised dissent to be quelled even stronger. As Saskia Sassen (1991) puts it, such places are not only functioning as command points for the global economy; they are also producing the means by which that commanding can be made effective. As the twin agents of the state and the market reshape and reorganise both the built environment and the types of social relation for its inhabitants. In many senses, their priorities imbricate under a neoliberal paradigm, with state-abetted repression invoking the notion of economic prudence.
“Financialisation…gets stretched and pulled in myriad directions.” But there is a “tendency of finance to penetrate and subsume economic activity and social life as a whole… in its voracious quest to permeate nonfinancial domains that it can then data-mine to create new financial products.”
Randy Martin
Martin, as an early theorist of financialisation, had a spatial sensibility derived from his background as a dancer/choreographer. This manner of thinking in dialogue between the abstract, immaterial flows of capital, with their material and spatial agency in the world and on the map, helps to trace the circuitous causality of contemporary life and the necessity of operating through the myriad levels of abstraction through our political practice. That is to say, the brick thrown through the window of a bank is choreographed by its own set of invisible forces.
And so when put into dialogue with radical politics we ask in turn: Who does the dishes for those on the picket line? Who sweeps the floor at the squatted safehouse? (For the latter, the answer is often no-one). These questions intersect with those around equity, and long-term sustainability of the movements to fight towards victory.
Above all, this edition of Financescapes convenes around these principal questions:
How has the financialisation of space compromised the conditions for autonomous and radical organising?
When space is running out, where can we conspire?
and, what can we do with these remains?
Programme:
Sunday 18th May, 11-5pm @ House of Annetta, Shoreditch
Sita Balani
Aretousa Bloom
Peter Ely
Christopher Jones
Esther Leslie
Thursday 22nd May, 7pm-10pm @ Atlas Cinema, Loughborough Junction
Screening programme TBA
Saturday 24th May, 11-5pm @ Pelican House, Bethnal Green
Ed Emery
Charlotte Grace
Helen Hester
Louis Moreno
Amardeep Singh Dhillon
Register here:
London is a city where international capital returns to roost. Within sight of the radiant behemoths of the financial sector, some of the most deprived communities in the country gaze upon the materialised excretions of the money market. But a metropolis containing this contrast of fortunes inevitably produces its discontents. And while the forces of finance capital place ever-greater demands on our space, time, budgets–leaving scant resources to conspire against them–these circumstances simultaneously produce a deepening urgency to move towards their abolition.
Where indoor spaces might once have welcomed assembly–a starting point to pursue other political demands–this crisis means for many, the focus now rests on attaining the space itself. Since 2008, the increasing velocity with which capital has sunk investment into real estate has deepened a housing crisis across the city. The turn towards a rentier economy, and increasing class divide determined solely by the property relation one has towards their home have immiserated countless lives. But conversely, the desperation of these conditions present a kernel of possibility in their politicisation of masses of renters and council tenants at the sharp end of this relation.
Meanwhile, the agents of ‘improvement’ progressively abolish the spaces where one can remain unsurveilled and to opt-out of the logics of exchange: the dingy industrial lanes, the safehouses, the squats, the social centres. Walk down Railton Road in Brixton, and a blue plaque at 121 emphatically delineates the past from the present. This building was the site of one of London’s longest running squats: first by Olive Morris in 1973, with an anarchist social centre later occupying the site from 1981-1999. Whilst being a locus for many radical cultural and political activities over this time, it could be said that the forces of the property market were the council’s principal motivation for its eventual eviction, seeking to thwart the ‘adverse possession’ clause at the eleventh hour which would have seen the building’s ownership bestowed upon its occupants.
We hope to tease out a materialist understanding of the substrate underlying different phases of radical thought and action, to uncover the interface between the affective, subjective experiences of frustration and mobilisation against the given, with the mechanics under the hood that both contribute to a consciousness to precipitate these conflicts, and the resources to sustain them over time. Therefore moralistic reflections around the shifting intensities of political action might be reevaluated through parameters set by changing circumstances: after all, the ability for 1970s radicals to easily procure a whole townhouse–from which they ran militant cadres, libraries, women’s centres, communal kitchens, and so on–might not speak to a difference in political ambition between the generations. And while gentrification discourse mostly focuses on the outdoor and visible from the street - what of the way the city has shifted to engender different modes of relation indoors - those of the intramural, the socially reproductive, and the clandestine?
With the decline of its empire, and the rise of the financial sector, London maintains a certain position as a central node in the global economy. It’s the stakes of this, as being a potential choke point for the circulation of capital, that makes the imperative for organised dissent to be quelled even stronger. As Saskia Sassen (1991) puts it, such places are not only functioning as command points for the global economy; they are also producing the means by which that commanding can be made effective. As the twin agents of the state and the market reshape and reorganise both the built environment and the types of social relation for its inhabitants. In many senses, their priorities imbricate under a neoliberal paradigm, with state-abetted repression invoking the notion of economic prudence.
“Financialisation…gets stretched and pulled in myriad directions.” But there is a “tendency of finance to penetrate and subsume economic activity and social life as a whole… in its voracious quest to permeate nonfinancial domains that it can then data-mine to create new financial products.”
Randy Martin
Martin, as an early theorist of financialisation, had a spatial sensibility derived from his background as a dancer/choreographer. This manner of thinking in dialogue between the abstract, immaterial flows of capital, with their material and spatial agency in the world and on the map, helps to trace the circuitous causality of contemporary life and the necessity of operating through the myriad levels of abstraction through our political practice. That is to say, the brick thrown through the window of a bank is choreographed by its own set of invisible forces.
And so when put into dialogue with radical politics we ask in turn: Who does the dishes for those on the picket line? Who sweeps the floor at the squatted safehouse? (For the latter, the answer is often no-one). These questions intersect with those around equity, and long-term sustainability of the movements to fight towards victory.
Above all, this edition of Financescapes convenes around these principal questions:
How has the financialisation of space compromised the conditions for autonomous and radical organising?
When space is running out, where can we conspire?
and, what can we do with these remains?
Programme:
Sunday 18th May, 11-5pm @ House of Annetta, Shoreditch
Sita Balani
Aretousa Bloom
Peter Ely
Christopher Jones
Esther Leslie
Thursday 22nd May, 7pm-10pm @ Atlas Cinema, Loughborough Junction
Screening programme TBA
Saturday 24th May, 11-5pm @ Pelican House, Bethnal Green
Ed Emery
Charlotte Grace
Helen Hester
Louis Moreno
Amardeep Singh Dhillon
Register here: