Parallel Urbanisms: Los Angeles in Whitechapel

Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Simon King will lead a walk which explores elements of Los Angeles in the East End. The walk was first commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery for their Nocturnal Creatures project in July 2018:
https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/events/walkative/

On this walk we will consider how Los Angeles coexists with the East End. Our tour will take both a historical perspective (focusing on Jack London’s The People of the Abyss published in 1903) and a more contemporary analysis, where we will look to images of the future as a way to consider how LA exists deep within Whitechapel and London in general. Here we will try to better understand the causal relation between media images, architectural space and the kind of transmutation of the city architectural space into cinematic image and how these forces return back to inform current developments in the city.

Along with Norman M. Klein and Harriet Edwards we guest edited the Journal of ‘Writing in Creative Practice’. For this issue we explored the notion of parallel urbanisms, not in terms of physical resemblances but in relation to deeper causal, psychic and economic points of convergence. Our approach is informed by geographers, artists and philosophers that have repeatedly shown that traditional physical geographies, fixed political boundaries or sites of economic exchanges can no longer be understood as stable measures of the fluid interchanges and connections that exist between cities.

Reading List

Steyerl, Hito, The Wretched of the Screen, Sternberg Press, 2012, pp. 212-230
Joseph-Lester, Jaspar, ‘(Re)turning to the image’, In: Aßman, S. et al., (ed.) Wenden: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf das Phänomen. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. 2017
King, Simon, Elephant Memory, In: Joseph-Lester, J. et al., (ed.) Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Vol 10, Number 2, 1 May 2018

Katharina Siegel

is an artist based in London and Berlin, who holds a Diploma in Fine Art from the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB) and a Master’s in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art London. Her multidisciplinary art practice is often research-based and explores concepts of experience, space, temporality and process. She was Co-President of the Walkative Society in 2019/20. www.katharinasiegel.de

Adalberto Lonardi

is an interdisciplinary designer developing creative strategies to empower the community. He holds an MA in Interior Architecture from the Royal College of Art and was Co-President of the Walkative Society in 2019/20. www.adalbertolonardi.com

Max Kohler

(b. 1996) is a writer, programmer, and designer based in London. Recent essays include Zoom Zoom Zoom, and Cloud Visions (forthcoming). He holds an MA in Visual Communication from the Royal College of Art. He was the Walkative Society’s Designer in Residence 2019/20. maxkoehler.com

Norman Klein

is an urban and cultural historian who is identified very much with Los Angeles. Among his best known work: History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory; The Vatican To Vegas: The History of Special Effects; The Imaginary 20th Century; Tales of the Floating Class. He is a professor in the School of Critical Studies, at California Institute of the Arts, in Los Angeles.