Home Sweet Home

Went to a small exhibition in Peckham yesterday at the Shopwork gallery. Artists Batchelor and Colson have spent a couple of years documenting the Ferrier estate in Kidbrooke, before and during demolition. The estate was built on the old Kidbooke Depot site between 1968 and 1972, designed by the GLC and system built by Wates, and its demolition has been barely remarked on compared to the array of articles on the Heygate's demise. Batchelor and Colson's work consists of coolly composed photographs of the decaying buildings and their isolated residents, and needlework samplers of CCTV cameras (that give the exhibition its title: Home Sweet Home). The centrepiece is a documentary produced with Zanuka adopting the same studied style as the photographs to record the residents' views on being left in barely functioning blocks while the community is siphoned off elsewhere. 200 homes were occupied when they started, now just five residents remain. Many of the stories of the residents in the film and on the captions under the photographs made me pretty angry.

HOME SWEET HOME from zaunka on Vimeo.

Batchelor and Colson hope to hold a much bigger exhibition of their work on the Ferrier soon, and I hope that goes ahead. The book of their exhibition is brilliant, containing many of the images as well as more in depth interviews with the subjects. Even the small selection housed at Shopwork is a powerful examination of the decline of an estate, the plight of its residents and the meaning of home.