The Olympic Park has received a lot of attention lately, unveiling its flagship stadium, promising to start work on it early and suffering fiery blazes which fortuitously destroyed a warehouse due for demolition. This Saturday though, an audaciously different kind of attention will be focused on the Stratford site: imagining the Olympics weren't happening.
WE SELL BOXES WE BUY GOLD is an artistic collaboration exploring what the Olympic site means to people and endeavouring to imagine an alternative future for it. The project includes artists, architects, environmentalists, historians, planners and urban sociologists, as well as representatives from local pressure groups and displaced residents.
A "thought experiment" will take place in a symposium on Saturday afternoon exploring what would result if the site was reimagined unfolding from the ground up rather then the top down. One of the moderators for this is Iain Sinclair, the wonderful visionary psychogeographic author of the sprawling M25 epic London Orbital and the respondents include one of the Manor Garden allotmenteers as well as several contributors to the Games Monitor website which looks at the real stories beneath the grand headlines.
Afterwards, you can experience a "fragmentary soundscape" installation called "Broken Trajectories" at the Sarah Bonner School, This is made up of extracts from 36 hours of recordings of personal stories, interviews, testimonies and itinerant voices about the area recorded on a series of walks and meanderings around the site earlier this year.
These events are the first public sharing of this enormously interesting and subversive work which is daring to question and think in the face of the unstoppable onslaught of the Olympic Games development and smack deliciously of imaginative, local resistance.
For more information visit the WE SELL BOXES WE BUY GOLD website.
