flat 70 is a community arts project in SE17.
We exist to support artistic, therapeutic & redistributive exchange between our existing and emerging community.
what is reclaim space?
A campaign with a mission to celebrate black craft and the important space black artists occupy as sources of inspiration to society. flat 70 is taking over digital screens across our home neighbourhood of Elephant & Castle as well as a couple extra iconic locations in the heart of London’s cultural districts, Southbank and Shoreditch. Bringing black art to the high street, the two-week walkable exhibition features work from 15 contemporary African & Caribbean visual artists in our network, all at different stages in their career, some from around the corner and others from around the world.
Check out our interactive map below to find all locations displaying art as part of the outdoor gallery.
If this project resonates, let us know how you feel by sharing your thoughts and exhibition encounters via the hashtags #reclaimspace #flat70 #supportblackartists.
flat 70 was founded in February 2020 by siblings Anthony and Senam Badu in response to the regeneration of their local area and the need to hold space for communities of colour. Celebrating and exchanging the gift of African & Caribbean culture, we offer a function-fluid space for artists, cultural workers of African & Caribbean heritage as well as other traditionally marginalised groups. Our services break down into five core activities: artist development, artist care, financial empowerment, cultural celebration, and cultural exchange.
walk the collection
Click on any of the flat 70 icons below to open up the location of each artwork and get directions to see it on the streets. Don’t forget to tag the artists as you share!
meet the artists
Adama Jalloh
Love story, 2017
Love Story is part of a long term project to do with my connection with London and a period of time when the love really started to spark while I was photographing black communities
Twitter: @AdamaJalloh_
Instagram: @_AdamaJalloh
Website: www.adamajalloh.co.uk
Ajamu X
Gay Pride, Brockwell Park, 1993
This photograph takes up public space quietly, assuredly. It's been a good while since I shared work in such public settings and I'm touched at flat 70's invitation to contribute a work to share with their local community. Queer black men holding space together is part of my everyday, it has been since I started making work in the 80's, but public imagery rarely reflects the kind of friendship shared by two men who happen to be black and gay. This image offers an intimacy to be savoured; the light touch of a friends hand on your shoulder, the joy of being surrounded by openness and a physical record of those who came before.
Website: www.ajamu-studio.com
Akeelah Bertram
Fragment, 2013
Light refraction captured from the installation 'Vase' 2013. 'Vase' is Akeelah's first major exploration of light and sound installation. This form focused work pairs a light display and a soundscape created from the very materials of the piece. Two glass vases holding water refract moving lines of white light from two data projectors, filling the floor, ceiling and walls with light.
Instagram: @akeelahbertram
Website: www.akeelahbertram.net
Chiizii
Romans 10:13, 2019
Medium: Collage Photography
Romans 10:13 is a part of the Traffic in Accra series, a collection of collage photography taken on my first trip to the Ghanaian capital. Astrologically, my Mercury DC & Jupiter IC lines meet here; representing a location where positive communication, philosophical/ scientific studies and mental activity occur. It is where harmonious international connections are made, and it has been that and much more for me.
Instagram: @chiizii
Website: chiizii.persona.co
Chris Adu
Infinite, 2020
Aylesbury Estate - When I saw this ramp I could just imagine all the different ways it’s been used over the years. From people just using it to get from A to B, to the kids using it as their playground running up and down playing tag. To the oldest on the estate using it as their meet up spot with and old skool Nokia playing the latest grime tracks from the local pirate radio station
Instagram: @mrtrouble
David Alabo
Phoenix, 2021
The Phoenix represents rebirth - a painful reflection and subsequent destruction of the self, shedding the old to create the new.
Instagram: @davidalabo
Website: davidalabo.com
Ethel Tawe & Edward Lobo
Transmission I (Zulu), 2021
“TRANSMISSION I (Zulu)” is a digital 3D collage by Edward Lobo and Ethel Tawe. In their collaborative “TRANSMISSION” series, the artists explore African hair-dressing practices across time and space. Hair has brought physical and spiritual proximity, and facilitated intergenerational knowledge transmission in Africa and the diaspora. This particular work features two AmaZulu women (from South Africa), styling the ‘Zulu Topknot’, a late 19th century cone-like coiffure which signified they were married. It is inspired by several histories of hair (the body) and architecture, subjects that both artists interrogate and intersect in their practices. In the spirit of reclaiming space, the artists fuse figurative collage-making and 3D environment design to create worlds which are timeless in their quality, and self-determined in their working with and against the archive. Ethel is a Cameroonian multidisciplinary artist who examines Africa’s ancient futures from a magical realist lens. Image-making, storytelling, and time-travelling compose the framework of her inquiry into collage-making as a means of breathing life into colonial African visual archives. Congolese architect and environment designer Edward Lobo, alias ‘Hueman NaTuRe’, creates African futurist landscapes that fuse African histories and philosophies of community and collaboration. He is interested in expanding and sharing findings on African technologies, and their place in contemporary society and our speculative futures.
Edward - Instagram: @hueman.ntr
Ethel - Twitter: @artofetheltawe
Instagram: @artofetheltawe
Website: www.artofetheltawe.com
Hamed Maiye
In search of; The space in between, 2020
An anthropological drawing exploring the grey space between memory and imagination.
Instagram: @mai_ye
Website: www.maiye.co.uk
Hanson Akatti
all we do is dance, 2017
In 2017, I showcased a body of work which was an attempt to share my thoughts, influences, memories, conundrums through the lens of pop culture, fiction and fantasy. I called it 'Stargate Odyssey'.It's my idea of an autobiography.
Within it, I fantasized about an African future where gender is a thing of the past and people dance to 'all we do is dance' with their android bestfriends. An Africa that is boundless. An Africa where we are all truly free.
Recent events in Ghana dimmed the light of this dream. I'm heartbroken by how much hatred we have continually shown towards people we have deemed different. For a country that claims to 'resist oppressors rule', we have been the oppressors.
I’m, however, encouraged by the many voices who have stood up against oppression. I see you and applaud you. To my friends, family, strangers who are LGBTQ+, though I can't stand in your shoes and cannot imagine what it is like, I choose to stand beside you till
the very end!
Instagram: @hansonakatti
Twitter: @hansonakatti
Website: www.hansonakatti.com
Heather Agyepong
Le Cake-Walk: Rob This England (#1), 2020 (Commissioned by The Hyman Collection)
This image is part of a photographic series called 'Wish You Were Here' which focuses on the work of Aida Overton Walker, the celebrated African American vaudeville performer who challenged the rigid and problematic narratives of black performers. She was known as the Queen of the Cake Walk which was a dance craze that swept America & Europe in the early 1900s. During the turn of the century postcards depicting Cake Walk dancers were distributed around Europe, which were often grotesque and offensive with the allure of spectacle where the performers lacked agency. Wish you were here uses the figure of Overton Walker to re-imagine these postcards as one not of oppression but of self-care with a mandate for people of Afro-Caribbean descent to take up space. The images explore the concepts of ownership, entitlement and mental wellbeing. Each image is layered with symbolism to illicit a conversation about the boundaries of how we see ourselves both in real and imagined realities.
Twitter: @heatha_a
Instagram: @heathatrottlives
Website: www.heatheragyepong.com
Jacob V Joyce
Quote from James Baldwin, 2015
Illustration of writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin with a quote from a speech he gave to a North London West Indian Cultural Centre in 1969. The full speech is available in 'Baldwins Nigger,' a film by Trinidadian director Horace Ove who is widely recognised as the first Black British film maker. Though it was made in the late 60's many of the issues raised by Baldwin and Dick Gregory in the film are still relevant today. particularly the line, "when you try to stand up and look the world in the face like you had a right to be here, you have attacked the entire power structure of the western world."
Instagram: @jacobvjoyce
Website: www.jacobvjoyce.com
Kunti Dabo
Figure with raised arms, 2020
For this drawing I was more interested in seeing what things like colour, line and tone would be able to produce. During the time I made this, I was looking at some old drawings and paintings from books and magazines as well as drawings I had made from life models which I have since misplaced.
Saman Archive
Two school girls on a moto, Anloga, c.1990
Saman is an archive of photographic negatives collected across Ghana since 2015. The project was initiated by Adjoa Armah. The word saman is an Akan word used to colloquially refer to the photographic negative, it can be translated as ghost in English. Alongside collecting photographic negatives, ethnographic information and the life histories of photographers, Adjoa has been collecting ghost stories and mapping key sites of Ghanaian history as part of the archives formation.
Instagram: @samanarchive
Website www.samanarchive.com
Sierra Nallo
Reflection Eternal, 2020
Isaac is captured in a moment of reflection at one of Accra's city beaches, Labadi. Having just graduated from secondary school, he was contemplative of the direction of his future; Wanting to be fulfilled in self, community and beyond as we all do.
This image is part of the body of work 'Youth of West Africa', exploring the ingenuity of youth and how environment shapes that experience.
Twitter: @sierranallo
Instagram: @sierranallo
Website: sierranallo.com