Arts Thread

What would Woolwich look like if we were to feed the seeds that could initiate the growth and spread of mutual aid, solidarity and sharing across the city? The project unfolds in Woolwich, where once was flourishing with “self-thumping vitality” being at the forefront of the cooperative movements is now felt by its inhabitants as being merely a passive site of capital extraction– with local agents being threatened out of their spaces due to top-down gentrification schemes. However, communities are never born out of top-down practices, they are formed through grassroots initiatives created by everyday city dwellers through intimate and dispersed roots of trust, mutual aid and solidarity that have been planted, taken care of to flourish. It is also through these networks of solidarity where the thresholds of the city have been transgressed—from barriers of difference into the common. The alternative world surrounds all of us, it is tangible and constantly being re-shaped by our collective struggle. From collective emancipation through social movements to collective re-appropriation of space, or just mundane initiatives of everyday solidarity– these are all ever-expanding narratives of “urban commoning ” offering us hopeful glimpses of how our cities could be radically remade if we were to foster conditions of our cities for bottom-up participatory city-making. Projecting this future on the site, Murray's Yard— re-imagining how an abandoned, forgotten corner of the city in which through 5 distinct phases, projected across 50+ years, could have the potential to blossom as a key transitory space and active frontier if it was to be incrementally re-claimed and re-appropriated by local actors. Building upon the existing conditions of the Woolwich with real characters, experiences and networks, my project becomes the medium to re-construct the narratives, characters and changes that are necessary to make the potential future a reality.