Limehouse Town Hall and the Living School

A reflective essay on Limehouse Town Hall and the Living School, curated by Brandon LaBelle (2018), was prompted by Livergant's participation in the Living School’s public session at the Town Hall in May 2016. Limehouse Town Hall is a long-term practice-led project social art project experimenting with forms of direct action and mutual aid. The Town Hall is a shared project made up of a diverse range of participants that seeks to offer an ethical model for cultural production, one that brings together arts, activism and alternative grassroots forms of civic participation. This reflection, On Self-Building, considers some of the challenges to anti-authoritarian co-creation and co-production that were thrown into relief by the Living School’s session at Limehouse Town Hall. The Living School began as a collaboration between artist Brandon LaBelle and the South London Gallery in 2014 and resulted in a series of four public sessions between February and June 2016. Focusing on issues of social housing, common life, precariousness, and self-building, the Living School sought to work as an informal pedagogical platform aimed at supporting dialogue as well as collective making. Each session consisted of workshops and presentations led by invited guests and was held at specific social and cultural venues in London. Through methods of improvisation, somatic practices, experimental pedagogy, and self-organization, the Living School acted as temporary situations from which to draw out possibilities for reimagining what it means to live together, and what a social house might become. Session 1: Expulsion (February 2016 / Peckham Liberal Club) Jane Rendell, professor, Bartlett School of Architecture zURBS, artist collective Irit Rogoff, professor, Goldsmiths College Session 2: Poverty (March 2016 / Ivy House Pub) Andrew Conio, artist, lecturer University of Kent Andrea Luka Zimmerman, artist, Fugitive Images Liz Allen, archivist, Toynbee Hall Session 3: Self-Built (May 2016 / Limehouse Town Hall) Chris Jones, 56a Archive RUSS, urban solutions initiative Elyssa Livergant, artist, Limehouse Town Hall Session 4: Shared Space (June 2016 / Open School East with the Anti-University) Aria Spinelli, researcher, Radical Intention Jonathan Hoskins, artist / researcher Brandon LaBelle, artist-in-residence, South London Galler