Mega Focus E15 Housing Stall

On Saturday the 2nd of March we had a giant street event for children affected by housing issues. In Newham 1 in 12 children are homeless. We call our weekly Saturday events where we meet people stalls, but you can think about them as places where we all hold the street for a couple of hours. Our weekly point of public contact is a street stall where people suffering from housing injustice can share their stories and plan actions. At a time when much pubic space is either being privatised or is heavily controlled the this is an essential thing to do. We also find that all methods at our disposal for sharing knowledge and experience need to be employed. Not only because different people learn in different ways but because we also claim the right to use artistic expression as a method of creating joy and resistance. This stall included a display of many painted banners sharing political and social knowledge of the local and international struggle for a just world in the face of increasing capitalist oppression. Many of these banners have beautiful contributions made by many children and some adults.

Our event also included a puppet show. It made use of some the puppets described here a new character

The regularity of the street stalls is incredibly important taking place as they do once a week. ‘…the essence of movements entails “repeated public displays” of alternative political and cultural values by a collection of people acting together outside officially sanctioned channels. (It is because those official channels have failed some people that movements arise.)‘¹ . We make use of street furniture and anything we can to create our displays. In some ways you could say this is a form of gorilla nomadic space claiming and the more badly they treat people the more we will do it.

The methods of making this work are described here . All the art work here unless otherwise stated is made in the Focus E15 campaign and much is either initiated or made by Andrew Cooper. I state this as I assert the right to say it is art, and we need to create a culture where this kind of work is supported.

1. Reed, T.V., (2019), The Art of Protest, Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the present ︎