Vision Quest depicts Marcus Coates’ three-year collaboration with a neighbourhood in Elephant & Castle (South London) that is suffering from a violent gentrification scheme. In this period the artist engaged in a shamanic quest to locate animal spirits able of guiding the community. Practising lengthily rites, the artist together with residents, local politicians and a psychedelic doom rock orchestra, appeal to guardian animals to appear in visions or dreams and to guide them in their troubled housing issues.

Ana Teixeira Pinto: How did the Elephant and Castle project came to your attention, do you have a personal connection to the Heygate?

Marcus Coates: My father had a small part in building it, he was involved in the specialized cranes they designed especially for this project. He has always been optimistic about these architectural projects as well as their intentions and innovations. My generation is now demolishing these social housing schemes from the sixties and breaking up the communities they created. I wanted to see what had changed in one generation. Over a period of four years I spent time with residents living on the Heygate estate and with people who were influencing the decisions that affected their futures i.e the council planning team and developers. The film is a snapshot of some of these experiences, my efforts to understand, as an outsider, the complexity of the impact of this new building development and my attempt to find some helpful insight into the problematic situation.

ATP: How do you feel about these type of architectural projects and the forms of socialization–and by extension the forms of individualization–they engender?

MC: The Elephant and Castle was a massive development in the 1960s, a newly built area to provide a good standard of housing (hot water, inside toilets, play areas for children, no traffic areas) to create safe, healthy communities. This architecture was designed to solve a crisis and be a vision for future living. To begin with, it certainly achieved what it set out to do: residents I spoke to were delighted and proud to be residents, changing their lives for the better. It was a combination of under-investment (cut backs on caretakers, repairs, maintenance etc) and a council policy of using the estates as a housing deposit for people with problems. The communities went from being robust and supportive to dysfunctional and estranged. According to some of the residents this was a deliberate policy, particularly in recent years to run down the estates to enable their replacement with profit-making developments. I have noticed that it is not the architecture that engenders forms of socialisation but the housing policies and poor management/investment that create a ghettoization. The new development has none of the social aims of the previous one, it will not help the housing shortage for people with low incomes but rather push them further out of London. This is in effect a cleansing of a community, to be replaced by high earners and businesses, another ghetto but this time for the wealthy.

ATP: If I’m not mistaken, your eagle is a “journey spirit guide”, the type of animal spirit that appears when you are at a biforcation on the road, but if one reads the news it seems clear that most of the residents are convinced that this change won’t be for the better, they don’t seem to see it as an open-ended situation, do they?

MC: It never was an open-ended situation. To begin with the residents thought the new development was for them, but soon realised that they would have to move away. My self appointed role was to consult, in a way that wasn’t possible for a council or developer to do. To understand the complexity of a community through its relationships and support networks, its history and emotion. I wanted to embody this position and represent it in a way that an artist can. I performed the concert with Chrome Hoof to create my own vision from what I had experienced, I wanted to find a core message that might link the past with the situation now to have influence in the future. Unfortunately it was too late for the residents of the Heygate.

ATP: The UK seems to be the only country whose artists still have a class consciousness, political art elsewhere is always universalist and abstract, somehow never about class differences, why do you think that is?

MC: I’m not aware of this, but I suspect that if you make work that confronts the reality of how we live you are compelled to move towards the visible influences and structures defining society. In the UK, class is a very visible and an increasingly complex structure in society. I am aware of how it influences my thinking and outlook on life, for me this is a strong motivation to engage with it.

Credits

A film by Marcus Coates (featuring Chrome Hoof)
Interviewees: Ernie, Tim, Waheed, Shane & Buster, Ken & Sarah, Southwark Council,Dave, Ola, Alison, Tony, Matthew, Daniel
Directed by Marcus Coates & Michael Smythe
Produced by NOMAD: Michael Smythe, Piera Buckland, Marcus Coates
Cinematographer: Annemarie Lean-Vercoe
Editor: Ariadna Fatjo-Vilas
Original Music: Chrome Hoof
Sound Design: Finn Curry
Sound Recordist: Sam Nightingale
Stills Photographer: Nick David
Additional Sound: Marcus Coates

Supported by Arts Council England