A Song for Nine Elms
Moving image / HD Video / Performance / 2015–2016 & 2019
24 minutes and 18 seconds / contact for full videoCommissioned by UP Projects
Funded by Wandsworth Council, London, UKCommissioned by UP Projects, A Song for Nine Elms was a year-long participatory art and moving image project examining the social, historical, and political transformations of Nine Elms, London, within the context of large-scale urban regeneration.
Developed through workshops with local residents and community organisations, the project explored how collective storytelling, music, and participatory performance can function as methods for articulating place-based memory and resisting the erasure often associated with redevelopment processes.
Drawing on Nine Elms’ horticultural heritage, radical political histories, and lived contemporary experiences, the work generated collaboratively authored song lyrics that formed the narrative structure for a film installation. These songs, composed with harpist Fraya Thomsen and with community participants were performed collectively, and operated as both cultural archive and speculative civic voice.
The project foregrounded overlooked local narratives — including the activism of nineteenth-century social reformer Charlotte Despard — situating historical struggles around housing inequality, labour, and community care in dialogue with present-day experiences of urban change.
A talk during architecture week in 2016 explored parts of the process.
In 2019 ‘Not Oak, But Elm’ was sung to celebrate the re-planting of the area’s final two Elm trees.
A Song for Nine Elms 2019, poster for public billboards:
