Laura Oldfield Ford’ will be talking at Cafe OTO on the eve of Verso's publication collecting the entire set of her 'Savage Messiah' fanzine to date.

Part graphic novel, part artwork, the book is both an angry polemic against the marginalization of the city’s working class and an exploration of the cracks that open up in urban space.

For this event Laura will be talking about specific geographical drifts charted in Savage Messiah that are local to OTO - Hackney, Dalston, and the Lea Valley areas - as well as showing images and playing some records that feature in the drifts.

"Drifting through Dalston is to traverse a network of holding patterns, a city in stasis. It is a series of film stills, waiting rooms, a world behind it and another yet to come. We escape surveillance by slipping in and out of bolt holes, dilapidated shops and bombsites.

Subverting colonised spaces and master planning strategies we carve out other realms beneath the eye of the cctv...

The Dalston masterplan. Class cleansing. Aerial surveillance, streets marked.

These megamall structures have eclipsed the postwar precincts and highlighted their obsolescence; theveneer is torn away to expose crude mechanisms.

Perhaps it is here that space can be opened to resist this neo liberal expansion, the endless proliferation of banalities and the homogenising effects of globalisation. Here in the burnt out shopping arcades, the boarded up precincts one might find the truth, new territories might be opened, there might be a rupturing of this collective amnesia."

REVIEWS

“One of the most striking fanzines of recent years is Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah, focussing on the politics, psychology and pop- cultural past of a different London postcode. Ford’s prose is scabrous and melancholic, incorporating theoretical shards from Guy Debord and Marc Augé, and mapping the transformations to the capital that the property boom and neoliberalist economics have wrought. Each zine is a drift, a wander through landscape that echoes certain strands of contemporary psychogeography. Ford—or a version of her, at least—is an occasional character, offering up narcotic memories of a forgotten metropolis. The images, hand-drawn, photographed and messily laid out, suggest both outtakes from a Sophie Calle project and the dust jacket of an early 1980s anarcho-punk compilation record: that is, both poetry and protest.”—Sukhdev Sandhu, New Statesman

“The consumer-friendly face of neoliberal Britain gets an anarchic makeover in Laura Oldfield Ford's politically biting work. … No false promises of a brighter, better, more sanitised tomorrow here. Instead, she focuses on areas haunted by an urban dispossessed, which regeneration seeks to concrete over: city wastelands where fortress-like old tower-blocks rise, with their Escher-like walkways and bleak “recreational” open spaces. ” – Skye Sherwin, Guardian

More information about Savage Messiah on the Verso website