22 OCT
19:00 -22:00  

Free Entry / Food & Drink 

TACO! Pavilion
1 Nest way
Cygnet Square
SE2 9FA

5mins from Abbeywood StationFull Disabled Access

Damp Screenings presents artist films by Avril Corroon, Winnie Herbstein, Lucy Clout and Eva George Richardson McCrea that explore the social actions, politics, and power dynamics that revolve around Housing. 

These artist films are presented alongside a selection of documentaries, adverts, and news clips curated by Avril Corroon, that feature Thamesmead, an iconic brutalist housing estate in SE London. Since its inception in the early 1970's Thamesmead has been fetishised and derided through onscreen representations, that have defined our preconceived ideas of the 'housing estate' and shaped Thamesmead’s identity.

The screening event forms a part of the public research project - Got Damp! - that explores the potential for damp and breath as a material for an artwork. The project is informed by Avril’s research into historic housing activism in London, contemporary living conditions, and the subject of damp as both ‘a crisis of nature in the home’and a galvanising issue for communities in exercising their political agency.

The Got Damp! project culminates with an exhibition by Avril at TACO! in March 2023
 
Dampbusters (2021), Winnie Herbsten
Dampbusters is third in a triptych of films exploring the past, present and future of community organising in Glasgow. The film centres around the work of Cathy McCormack, a housing and anti-poverty activist from Easthall in Easterhouse. Shifting from the past to the present, the film is interspersed by Slaghammers, a woman and non-binary welding group, who are finally moving into a new space.The film traces the architectural mapping of this newly-claimed space alongside discussions around the group's organisational structure.’

Rope (2022), Eva George Richardson McCrea
Rope is shot in a vacant building owned by a prominent property developer in Frankfurt. Three men dressed in smart casual attire sit around a table in the decaying corpse of a building. They eat food and have a conversation about Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Rope, and discuss various aspects of property development. Alongside the conversation about Rope, other dialogue is constructed from interviews and writings of Daniel Doctoroff, former CEO of Sidewalk Labs (Google's "smart cities" start-up); Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class; and Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects.

Spoiled Spores (2019), Avril Corroon
Cultures of toxic mould are sampled from the walls of rental accommodation in Dublin and London and incorporated into the recipe of cheese making. Participating homes were found through the artists’ extended network of peers and the resulting 30 cheese wheels are named after the individual participants. The film documents the provenance of the mould and cheese-making process with menus outlining rental fees and ingredients lists including toxic black mould and other moulds sampled on each respective site.

Warm Bath (2016), Lucy Clout

Warm Bath’ is a home movie. It is a looping fiction telling two interlocking stories. The first, a group of seven women, each obsessed with the movement of water within their shared, UPVC and mildew, North London house. The second, a man who films a particular drainage ditch twice a day, every day, in the sunny Southern Californian endoergic basin.  Warm Bath’ documents structures by which people maintain themselves – physically, socially and via repetition/routine.

︎ Screening notes with details of all screened content will be available at the event.


Winnie Herbstein lives and works in Amsterdam. Her work focuses on historical and contemporary forms of organising in relation to housing, architecture and the formation of space. Currently they are researching sustainable materials and sustainable relationships at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. Her work has been screened in galleries and institutions nationally including  CCA Glasgow, The Barbican, Jupiter Woods (London), and South London Gallery.

Avril Corroon lives and works in London. Her work examines inequity and how architecture manifests governance. She works across moving image, performance, sculpture, and food to explore inequity and how architecture manifests governance. Previous work has explored precarious living conditions, the housing crisis and labour exploitation. Avril was the recipient of the Freelands Foundation Bursary, and the Next GenerationAward by the Irish Arts Council in 2020. She has exhibited and performed widely including Peer Gallery (London), the Lab Gallery (Dublin), Platform Arts (Belfast) and South London Gallery.

Eva George Richardson McCrea lives and works in Dublin and Frankfurt. Working primarily in moving image, Richardson McCrea’s practice takes specific sites as points of departure to explore social architectures, power and belief systems. Borrowing from conventions of television, documentary, cinema and theatre her work draws on a range of source material, from philosophy and current affairs to the language of advertising and aspirational living.   Their work has been screened in galleries and institutions Interantionally including Löwengasse, (Cologne), Project Arts Centre, (Dublin) and CCA, Glasgow. Her work is included in the Arts Council of Ireland National Collection.

Lucy Clout lives and works in London. She works primarily in video. Her practice examines the embodied experience of language, in particular minor-speech (disposable or insignificant), to think about sickness and pleasure. Lucy understands her works as kinds of ‘home movie’ — they are not essays or arguments but collages of tone, building upon deep histories of diaristic, queer, feminist film-making.
Recent solo exhibitions include Humber Street Gallery 2020 and Cubitt Gallery 2019. She was the artist in residence for Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2018 and won the Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella award in 2015.