Damp Screenings presents artist films by Avril Corroon, Winnie Herbstein, Lucy Clout and Eva George Richardson McCrea that explore the social actions, politics, and power dynamics that revolve around Housing.

These artist films are presented alongside a selection of documentaries, adverts, and news clips curated by Avril Corroon, that feature Thamesmead, an iconic brutalist housing estate in SE London. Since its inception in the early 1970's Thamesmead has been fetishised and derided through onscreen representations, that have defined our preconceived ideas of the 'housing estate' and shaped Thamesmead’s identity.

The screening event forms a part of the public research project - Got Damp! - that explores the potential for damp and breath as a material for an artwork. The project is informed by Avril’s research into historic housing activism in London, contemporary living conditions, and the subject of damp as both ‘a crisis of nature in the home’ and a galvanising issue for communities in exercising their political agency.

Warm Bath (2016), Lucy Clout

Warm Bath’ is a home movie. It is a looping fiction telling two interlocking stories. The first, a group of seven women, each obsessed with the movement of water within their shared, UPVC and mildew, North London house. The second, a man who films a particular drainage ditch twice a day, every day, in the sunny Southern Californian endoergic basin. Warm Bath’ documents structures by which people maintain themselves – physically, socially and via repetition/routine.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/38377