Bare Dust

The film Bare Dust (7 minutes) was made with a group of adolescent boys living on the Trowbridge housing estate in East London. The film explores the minial spaces of the city, the spaces bewteen demolition and building, childhood and adulthood, dreams and reality, utopian ideals and commercial enterprise. The estate was built during the 1960’s when a utopian vision for new social housing was seen as an answer to poverty and social inequality in the area. The large blocks of flats where the boys once lived have been pulled down to make way for a new corporate social vision for social housing. In this period of transition the boys play football on the ghost like imprints of the abandoned foundations of the tower bocks where they once lived. The group of adolescent boys are filmed playing football over these abandoned foundations. The camera frames their feet as they criss cross these surfaces, never seeming to touch the ground. Their fragmented voices surface from a low, heavy sound, talking of rootlessness, vulnerability and violence. Images of the enormous weight of the tower blocks repeatedly interrupt the flow of the boy’s footwork as the buildings are blown up and collapse heavily to the ground.