In February of this year, the popular community newspaper, Hackney Citizen, published a story about the Hackney Heart, a pop-up enterprise that first brokered a temporary home on Narrow Way, before moving on to more established premises on Mare Street. The “cafe-cum-gallery” was set up by food and travel writer, […]

I moved studios this weekend and everything is still on the floor. Every surface is covered in piles of books and bin liners full of clothes. These days, a typical ‘studio’ day – or a ‘not at my job’ day – involves meetings with other artists, working on job applications […]

Words are spectral – they present what is not present, they slide and deceive and are defined by their power of deferral. While there has always been power in the persuasion of words, somehow their very symbolic nature cannot conceal their character as media: we are always aware that they […]

A growing wave of direct action is bringing change to the low wage culture of London’s cinemas. One fifth of workers’ pay in Britain is beneath the living wage (or ‘poverty threshold wage’) of £7.65 an hour. The employees at London’s independent cinemas are amongst those experiencing exploitation, but a […]

Forced evictions and brutal street murders in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, committed by a militarised police, have typified the ‘preparations’ for this year’s World Cup in Brazil, showing once again that sport cannot be detached from politics. The institution of international sport is an important vehicle for the […]

“The day after the Can Vies eviction, the neighbours got up as if we were suffering from the amputated limb syndrome. At the moment, the pain deriving from the loss of an essential part of our body is unbearable. They have taken away from us a place where many of […]

Capitalism is locking-in climate change for centuries, but in the process, making radical social change more realistic than tinkering around the edges. I : Ruins There is an oft-quoted passage from the Spanish anarchist militant Buenaventura Durruti. Many readers will know it by heart. It reads: “It is we who […]

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ‘Wonko the Sane’, a marine biologist from California, finds himself confronted with a pack of toothpicks with printed instructions on them. Wonko is moved to redraw the boundary of the asylum to encompass the whole world – except his home, which he turns […]

“Don’t they get it? Don’t they understand that Facebook and Twitter are part of the government surveillance machine?” Comments like this are a vignette of the evolution within online activism in recent years. They are often heard from the mouths of veterans of the anti-globalisation movement in reference to the […]

Those of us in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans* and queer (LGBTQ) communities will soon find ourselves bombarded with Tory appeasement as the first same-sex marriages are conducted in England. Marriage can be beautiful, meaningful, and vital for enacting immigration rights, but what does marriage mean in terms of state […]