Living Room is a multimodal, interactive online documentary (I-doc) which was created as part of my anthropological doctoral research into the demolition of a modernist public housing estate in London. The I-doc foregrounds the analyses, experiences and activism of those working-class, racialised residents who refuse the demolition assemblage. It asks: how is everyday life made and re-made within and despite the structural violence of demolition, and the attendant dispossession, social cleansing and gentrification it engenders? How do residents assert their rights to home, community and the city, and refuse any predetermined outcomes? Living Room offers the user the choice to experience any of the 5 main thematic strands in the order they wish. Each strand represents one instantiations of the demolition assemblage, understood as a bundle of processes, materials, temporalities, and discourses. Legal proceedings, housing occupations, modernist architectural forms, the media, and everyday practices of homemaking are all options presented in an iterative, non-linear fashion via videos, collage, and audio. The form of the i-doc reflects both the open-ended and uncertain nature of the demolition and gives space to residents’ refusal of the un-commoning of their homes.

Caterina Sartori is a visual and urban anthropologist interested in spatial and housing justice movements, political ecology, the anthropology of the built environment, and creative multimodal research methodologies. She developed the interactive online documentary Living Room as part of her doctoral research on the demolition of a council estate in London. She is currently Research Associate for High-Rise Landscapes at the University of Manchester. She previously held the post of Film Officer and Film Festival Director at the Royal Anthropological Institute (2015-2023).