BOOK EVENT‘Savage Messiah’ with Laura Oldfield Ford
Saturday 1st December, 6.30pm Entry £3, redeemable against purchase
Artist and writer Laura Oldfield Ford introduces her psychogeographic take on London.
Savage Messiah is an unflinching and compassionate examination of London urban landscapes within the confrontational cultural politics of the 1990’s. Originally published as a series of zines it quickly developed cult status and has recently been brought into book form by Verso. Laura will be discussing her work and the politics that permeate it. Drawing from a diverse range of fields including critical theory, illustration and an updated Punk-collage aesthetic, it considers the plight of people in areas of London facing intense structural change from the unrelenting gentrification unleashed by both Thatcherism and New Labour.
“One of the most striking fanzines of recent years is Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah, focussing on the politics, psychology and pop- cultural past of a different London postcode. Ford’s prose is scabrous and melancholic, incorporating theoretical shards from Guy Debord and Marc Augé, and mapping the transformations to the capital that the property boom and neoliberalist economics have wrought.
Each zine is a drift, a wander through landscape that echoes certain strands of contemporary psychogeography. Ford—or a version of her, at least—is an occasional character, offering up narcotic memories of a forgotten metropolis.
The images, hand-drawn, photographed and messily laid out, suggest both outtakes from a Sophie Calle project and the dust jacket of an early 1980s anarcho-punk compilation record: that is, both poetry and protest.”—Sukhdev Sandhu, New Statesman
Title information
Title: Savage Messiah
Author: Laura Oldfield Ford
Our Price: £19.99
Format: Paperback
Size: 448 pages (211mm x 138mm x 31mm)
ISBN: 9781844677474
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 29 September 2011
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