PARADE FOR LOCKDOWN
Flags, Manifestos, Films and Veg
October 2019 - May 2020
Before isolation there were flags and songs and streets.
Now there’s home.
I’m making a parade for lock down.
Until lock down I was working with local people in Bow, East London, where I live. I had plans to film a community parade marching the streets of Bow in August, holding banners we had made covered in fruit and vegetables and singing songs about hope that we had written. The piece was about the resurrection of London’s green spaces, wild spaces and market gardens pre industrialisation. It asked the question of what a community can do when we collaborate with the past to speculate on what it could mean for our present and future. I’m now at home in lock down. Instead I’ve been making my own banners, working out what it means to have a parade in these conditions. The parade is now home-bound: instead of pamphlets there are paintings, instead of streets there are textured walls, instead of songs on the streets there are manifestos about hope in isolation.