They started up their own community bank. Now they're building a solar-power station for their street. Some artivists!
We have a category on these pages titled “new energy sources”. It’s the idea that we need to draw on different resources (of imagination, passion, metaphor, vision) in order to get projects and initiatives done. Picturing that something is possible, legitimate and desirable, under the right conditions, can bring it closer to being realised.
Exemplars of that are the artists and filmmakers Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn. They started their own bank in 2018/19, out of an old street front in Walthamstow, in order to raise money to buy up more than £1m worth of debt. They called it the Bank Job - which ended up in a literal explosion of the debt papers.
They like to engage with bold gestures, do Powell and Edelstyn. Their latest is called “Power” - and their aim is to turn their residential street in Walthamstow into a literal power station, by raising money to buy solar panels for every roof. As they open it up:
POWER is a show and do project—tracking the real-time progress and pitfalls of building a solar POWER STATION across the rooftops of North East London via enacting a grassroots Green New Deal. It involves mass participation art,documentary film and cooperative energy as a diverse community come together to recognise our collective power and quite literally create it—moving from consumers to producers of energy. It draws on mutual aid networks and a core solar punk idea of infrastructure as resistance and power.
This is arts led stimulus giving ourselves the power of Government to address the big challenge of our time. We take an ambitious local act (building a POWER STATION)—making it global as we highlight and work through the complexities of taking action in the climate emergency—telling the stories of extractive processes, inequalities and injustice whilst attempting to tackle these as best we can on the ground. This is a public work of art involving practical thinking through making—collaborating with people and photons to explore and expand our relationships with each other and the sun we all live under.
Like the BankJob, they’re raising money by selling beautifully made bank-notes - like these - celebrating community organisations:
Powell and Edenstyn are bold, funny and a bit wild - see the opening sequence of their promo film at the top, where one of them heart-stoppingly clambers onto their own roof.
But as their inspiring and idealistic blog entries show, they are using the power of artistic imagination to expand the political and economic opportunities available to people at a street-level - and doing it with such infectious, can-do joy that you’d imagine they’d mobilise many.
Lots to learn, perhaps, for those wanting to bring regenerative systems into being - in terms of connecting the task with the pleasures of making and achieving. Compare, for example, this strong presentation from mPower on “energy communities” - a great example of top-down European structures amplifying local ambition. But the vibe…