Own De Beauvoir! combines fictional writing, archive material and personal accounts to tell the story of how people living in the same neighbourhood may come to own its collective, narrative and spatial future. Over 15 years spanning 1970s, action by residents of the east London neighbourhood of De Beauvoir Town overturned state plans to demolish the entire area, before remaking its spaces to effect a very different future.
The narrative is related through the journal of a fictional resident who seeks to understand his neighbourhood’s collective and material history comprehensively. His home is clearly the outcome of this decisive period but under inspection it turns up social capillaries, institutional complexities and fragmentary imaginaries at odds with the familiar future it produced.
The publication is the culmination of a two year social project by writer and visual artist Jonathan Hoskins, commissioned by Open School East.
-
303 pgs, 17 × 11.4 cm, Softcover, 2016, 978-1-5262-0631-2