Gentrification Immersion mobility Wasted Space-times "Reel City"

The Floating Cinema: Navigating Tensions

By Ella Harris

14^th December 2018

The Floating Cinema was a London based, mobile cinema operating from a purpose-built barge. Created with support from Olympic Legacy funding, it was designed to engage with local communities through film programming, traveling to various destinations within and beyond London.

While other ‘immersive’ pop-up cinemas offer embodied experiences of fictional, cinematic worlds, The Floating Cinema takes on a different understanding of immersion, aiming to enable cinematic experiences of real, urban places. Here Anna, their Education and Participation Co-ordinator, discusses an event at Brentford Lock, which was run in partnership with the housing developers regenerating the site. She touches on the difficulties of navigating tensions between using The Floating Cinema to enhance places for communities and playing into the hands of developers by exacerbating gentrification. Do The Floating Cinema’s events increase connections to place for existing residents of places like Brentford, or do they make them appealing to those pushed out of more traditionally desirable areas of the capital?

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Ella Harris

Ella Harris is a researcher and writer interested in 'crisis cultures', epistemically just creative methods and inventive knowledge exchange strategies. She is currently working on the project Story Arcs at Bath Spa University as the Narrative Exchange Champion as well as undertaking freelance research for clients including Natural England, Caring in Bristol and the Runnymede Trust.

Previously, Ella was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Geography Department at Birkbeck, University of London. Prior to this, she was an ESRC postdoctoral fellow in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. She's also worked as a research assistant in the Geography Department at Royal Holloway University on a collaborative project on pop-up social housing. She completed a PhD in Cultural Geography at Royal Holloway University in 2017.

Ella has published widely on subjects including the cultural geographies of precarity, pop-up culture, housing insecurity, immersive cinema and interactive documentary. Her book on pop-up culture is out now and her latest interactive documentary, about COVID-19 lockdown in London, can be found here.

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