Aislinn Evans

Commission by Create London for Breaking Waves, Downstream is a 2-channel video installation on display at Eastbury Manor House November 2023 – April 2024.

A two channel film, Downstream puts the front and back of Creekmouth in dialogue. Waste, like Angela Davis’s critique of the prison, is something we understand as disappearing away from us, with little thought to where it goes. The disappearance of visual, social, and aesthetic contamination is essential to maintaining notions of beauty, urban progress and pastoral idyll. The Barking Riverside development is cheek to cheek with the waste industry, always in the eyeline and underpinning the soundscape of the pastures cultivated to create a sense of naturalism, wilderness, and escaping urban thrum. Just next door, workers sort rubble, steel, old mattresses and Bags For Life. It will be melted, shredded, and burned. It’s loaded onto barges that pass serenely down the Thames. It fills still-active landfills in Essex or releasing effluent into the North Sea.

These two sites, disparate as they may seem, have much in common. Essential to constructing the modern city, they maintain its identity and sense of proper place. They are both highly controlled environments, built and worked on the schedule and permission of planners and managers. Like the origins of the Becontree Estate, real instances of rewilding emerge from the plan, as human ingenuity and the resourcefulness of nature claim and repurpose the overlooked corners of warehouses, the crevices in the sea wall. Ruptures in the plan, these autonomous marks of human, animal, and plant presence continue to remake the Riverside in their image.

Editing assistance & technical installation by Margot McEwen.