2016 in review

Profile: Jonathan Hoskins

Detail from Catallax Point, 2014, a social project; the illustration is an unrendered projection of a fictional building design

An article published in the Hackney Citizen on 23 May last year featured a digital rendering of a high-rise apartment block under the headline, ‘Is this the future of Hackney’s iconic Rose Lipman Building?’. The article announced a one-day event the following month to discuss ideas, plans and desires for the future of the former library turned community hall, a site which the local Council had ear-marked as ‘suitable for redevelopment’. The accompanying image was a fictional proposal, commissioned from an architect by artist Jonathan Hoskins to represent one potential future: a blocky, jaunty building not unlike any of the other new-build apartments popping up frequently around London. Some readers, however, took the article as a statement of intention and the image as a confirmed plan. Property developers, residents associations and councillors were soon in touch – concerned, curious, angry. ‘No is the answer to your headline,’ was one comment to the online article. ‘A vanity student project is hardly news,’ ‘No and no again!’ tweeted Councillor Philip Glanville, the head of housing for Hackney. In response to the attention the article generated, Hackney Council also issued a statement that they had ‘no plans to demolish or sell the Lipman building’.

The article was an accident; Hoskins, then an associate at Open School East in the Lipman building, had been in touch with the Citizen to try to get his event listed in the paper and wasn’t aware of the story until it was printed, but it remains one of the few visible points of his project Catallax Point, 2014, a series of collaborations and events revolving around the uses and fate of the Lipman building. The project is symptomatic of Hoskins’s work, in that it exists primarily within a set of long-term relationships and concerns, addressing political efficacy, social groupings, urban change and folklore, and gentrification, looking at the history of housing associations and intentional communities; these processes eventually shape performances, texts, publications and events. Catallax Point, like much of Hoskins’s recent work, also revolves around his own east London neighbourhood of De Beauvoir. The newspaper article marks a point where the project achieved its own dubious success by removing it from the artist’s hands, the fiction of the not-yet-planned building instigating a wider, heated discussion. After the June meeting, two local residents’ groups assumed control of the project, forming an action group to ensure that their vision of the future of the site might be the one that prevails.