Weekender with Andrea Zimmerman – PubliCity: Art, Activism and Social Space

£60 for both days. 10.30am-5.30pm. All participants will be offered a free ticket to the screening of 'Estate, a Reverie' on the Friday evening (7.30pm, 23 October).

As London undergoes rapid transformation at the hands of developers and increasing polarisation between rich and poor, filmmaker and cultural activist Andrea Luka Zimmerman leads a Weekender exploring artistic engagement with public space. Moving from Toynbee Studios to the outdoors, participants will look at ways to develop work which interrogates, questions and resist these trends. Zimmerman and Fugitive Images’ longterm three-part Estate project made in Hackney will be reviewed as a case study.

A public screening of Zimmerman’s acclaimed film Estate, a Reverie takes place the night before the Weekender lab. This will be followed by a conversation between Zimmerman and artist Graeme Miller, exploring their experiences of working with particular communities and sites affected by demolition and regeneration.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a filmmaker, artist and cultural activist. Andrea grew up on a large council estate and left school at 16. After coming to London in 1991, she went to Central St. Martins, where she now teaches. She is co-founder of the artists' collective Fugitive Images (I am here and Estate: Art, Politics and Social Housing in Britain). Her new essay-film Estate, a Reverie, tracks the passing of the Haggerston Estate in East London and the utopian promise of social housing it offered, with a spirited celebration of extraordinary everyday humanity. Filmed over seven years, Estate reveals and celebrates the resilience of residents who are profoundly overlooked by media representations and wider social responses, and asks how we might resist being framed exclusively through class, gender, ability or disability, and through geography even. Her essay-film Taskafa, Stories of the Street (66mins, 2013), about resistance and co-existence and voiced by John Berger, is told through the lives of the street dogs of Istanbul. A founding member of Vision Machine, she has also worked in the USA and Indonesia, exploring the impact of globalisation, power and denied histories. 

Andrea Luka Zimmerman has been shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award 2015. Estate, A Reverie has been nominated for A Grierson Trust Best Newcomer Documentary 2015. 

A public screening of Zimmerman’s acclaimed film Estate, a Reverie takes place the night before the Weekender lab.