Archival research, public art interventions, ritual happenings
2023 – ongoing
When neighbourhoods are demolished, communities are pulled apart and their collective grief is buried underneath new development projects. How do we surface that grief? How can we make visible the efforts of resistance even after gentrification has happened?
Venturing from London & Rotterdam where the detrimental effects of policy-driven gentrification are blatantly visible; I draw attention to the havoc it wreaks in the lives of the gentrified and coin the term ‘gentrification grief’. People are largely unaware that this is genuine grief and aren’t equipped to deal with it adequately. I therefore explore the role that makers and designers can take up in aiding/facilitating the necessary mourning process. This resulted in eight design principles that can be used by designers to make therapeutic interventions. Not as sleazy fixes to clear the conscience of municipalities and housing corporations, but as bottom-up acts of radical care, from one citizen to another.
I used this toolkit to make public art interventions in my own surroundings: de Tweebosbuurt. A gentrification project so disruptive that the UN deemed it a human right violation. I crafted gravestones made with rubble and old pictures of the neighbourhood, placed them at the demolition sites and invited inhabitants to use them as a grief processing rituals.
This research just dips its toes in the breadth of what ‘gentrification grief’ can mean and how we can address it. I plan on elaborating on it in the coming years.
