Design partnership Dash’n’Dem (which include Goldsmiths Design lecturer Dash Macdonald) worked with grime artists and local teenagers in the River Lea area to produce tracks about the social history of East London and its significance to our current times. The project, part of the wider Odd Guides project delivered by Create London, includes a video supported by a Goldsmiths Design Research Grant, which you can now watch online in full. Dash explains:
“One of the tracks that we created was a conversation around the history of immigration, particularly with the docks and that area of East London bringing immigrants from all over the world, and looking at the different tensions that happened, from the Irish, the European, Asian, Afro-Caribbean immigrants as they came to settle, and repeatedly how populist politicians have played the immigration card, whether that’s Oswald Mosley, Enoch Powell, or today [Nigel] Farage and Boris [Johnson] with slogans such as: “We want our country back” or Take back control”. In the end, it’s having a conversation with these young people about what those slogans mean, how it made them feel, and how can design challenge that.”
Goldsmiths Design Blog 