Whitechapel Gallery’s collaboration with the RESOLVE collective led to a targeted intervention in Angel Alley, focused on practical improvements and community engagement, Conducted from 2021 to 2023, RESOLVE’s work aimed to lay the groundwork for what they termed ‘Stage 0’—a foundational phase that prioritised practical, community-focused interventions over grander, immediate outcomes.
The project involved close work with the ‘Angel Allies,’ a group of local stakeholders including Freedom Press and Cardboard Citizens, who helped steer the project. Instead of emphasising traditional art installations, the project addressed historical gaps and current issues within the alley through interviews, emotional mapping, and archival research. These efforts aimed to enhance conditions for vulnerable users and facilitate discussions among stakeholders, and led to the installation of two murals and urgent infrastructure such as improved lighting and a new water tap.
The results, detailed in four pamphlets, underscore the importance of addressing systemic issues before pursuing additional artistic or physical changes.
RESOLVE is an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. We have delivered numerous projects, workshops, publications, and talks in the UK and across Europe, all of which look toward realising just and equitable visions of change in our built environment.
Much of our work aims to provide platforms for the production of new knowledge and ideas, whilst collaborating and organising to help build resilience in our communities. An integral part of this way of working means designing with and for young people and under-represented groups in society.
Here, ‘design’ encompasses both physical and systemic intervention, exploring ways of using a project’s site as a resource and working with different communities as stakeholders in the short and long-term management of projects. For us, design carries more than aesthetic value; it is also a mechanism for political and socio-economic change.
For 30 years, Cardboard Citizens has used theatre to transform lives impacted by homelessness. Founded in London’s ‘Cardboard City’ (now the site of the IMAX cinema in Waterloo), they create theatre, art and training with and for people experiencing homelessness, poverty and inequity that explores, interrogates and challenges the injustices that are most alive in our world today.
Cardboard Citizens believes that theatre and art can transform; that it can challenge the individual to grow and ignite a fire in the belly of wider society to change. They create spaces where communities come together to heal, connect, find joy and create new possibilities, delivering workshops and public performances at their base in Whitechapel and in other arts and community settings across the UK.
Freedom Press bookshop is Britain’s largest anarchist bookshop, stocking thousands of books, newspapers and pamphlets covering topics from history to sex, philosophy to workers’ struggles, fiction to anti-fascism.
Funded by London Borough of Tower Hamlets
With special thanks to Naomi Agyekum and Ross Hughes
