Documentation

Stadtgespräch. Metropolitan Perspectives #16

Tuesday, October 27, 2015, 7 pm
Sacrifice and Survival: Summer Olympics and their Aftermath
A though from Anthony Iles (writer and editor of Mute, London)
In English language

The London 2012 Olympics was both the aporia and apotheosis of an era of transition in Great Britain. In 2008 the subprime crisis quickly became a global economic crisis. The cheap liquidity, global housing bubble briefly evaporated, only to be renewed and reinflated through a severe program of governent-directed ‘austerity’, planning and banking deregulation, faster privatisation, and a renewed class war on the poor. The London 2012 Olympics acted as a mega-project, conferring ‘super-agency’ upon a number of new governmental entities charged with delivering the Games and the permanent ‘park’ in which they were to take place. The Olympic process is driven by the international interests of corporate media conglomerates, sponsors, and the enduring necessity for high-profile ‘events’ and ‘projects’ to project a vision nationally and internationally of the Nation or city and government as capable, prosperous and tolerant. Anthony Iles published extensively on the political consequences of the urban transformations leading up to the 2012 Olympics, from 2007 onwards, and continues to follow the outcomes of this conflagration in terms of current urban struggles in London and elsewhere. What scenarios could be evoked for the city development in Hamburg and which cultural consequences could be discussed from this perspective?

Anthony Iles is a writer of criticism and fiction based in London. He is a doctoral candidate in political sciences at Middlesex University, a contributing editor with Mute / Metamute, author, with Josephine Berry-Slater, of the book, No Room to Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City (Mute Books, 2011), and an editor of the forthcoming publication, Anguish Language: Writing and Crisis (Archive Books, 2015).