Phoenix City 2021: Art, Regeneration, and Counter-Atmospheres in the UK City of Culture

This text stems from an exchange between Duncan Whitley and Mel Jordan, exploring Whitley’s film Phoenix City 2021, commissioned by Coventry Biennial for the UK City of Culture 2021.

Mel Jordan: I’ll begin by explaining what the UK City of Culture is for non-UK readers who may not be familiar with the scheme. The concept was inspired by Liverpool’s time as the European Capital of Culture in 2008. The UK City of Culture (UKCoC) scheme was launched in 2013, with Derry/Londonderry becoming the first UKCoC in 2013 after winning the bid in 2009. The initiative was designed as a domestic version of the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) programme.¹“UK City of Culture,” Wikipedia, last modified February 15, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_City_of_Culture. The City of Culture concept uses culture as a tool for regeneration, boosting tourism, and engaging local communities. The programme highlights a city’s unique cultural contributions and its potential for artistic and economic development.

Could you share how Phoenix City 2021 came to be? And how did your film engage with the tension between the optimistic PR messaging of UKCoC and the lived realities of regeneration and urban transformation in Coventry, particularly in terms of its impact on local communities and artistic spaces?

Duncan Whitley: Phoenix City 2021 was an artwork commissioned for an exhibition in Coventry Biennial’s gallery show HYPER-POSSIBLE, during UK City of Culture 2021 in Coventry. The project grew out of conversations with Ryan Hughes (Artistic Director & CEO of Coventry Biennial) about the opportunity to observe the city of Coventry in the lead-up to and during UK City of Culture (UKCoC) 2021. We were both curious about how UKCoC would unfold in the city from the moment it was announced live on national television that Coventry would be the next UKCoC in December 2017. 

MJ: Your account reminds me of what Mel Ramsden describes in his essay “On Practice.”²Mel Ramsden, “On Practice,” in Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (MIT Press, 2009), 170–199. He discusses the development of art as a dialectical process, with the artwork itself evolving alongside the modes of production. Ramsden argues that the forces shaping contemporary art — including the context of artmaking, nineteenth-century institutions, public funding, cultural policy, and the market — are the societal conditions influencing artistic production. Grappling with these paradoxes is common in contemporary art. Ramsden refers to this as the “material practice problem world,”³Ramsden, “On Practice,” 172. where he views artworks as temporal, local practices. Regarding the making of artworks, Ramsden emphasises the importance of creating a context that first allows for the recognition of one’s own problems.⁴Andrew Hewitt and Mel Jordan, “Build Tools, Technology, and Cultural Institutions for the Common Good,” talk presented at Arts and Solidarity, CASCO Art Institute, Utrecht, Netherlands, April 2024. It seems that what you’re describing aligns with Ramsden’s ideas about artistic practice and the function of culture.

DW: I would say so. We were keen to engage critically with the UKCoC scheme — a Department of Media Culture and Sport (DCMS) project that claims the use of art and culture to promote economic growth and social cohesion⁵Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, “UK City of Culture 2021: Guidance for Bidding Cities”, accessed 26 January, 2025, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7580a5ed915d731495a771/UKCITYOFCULTURE2021guidance.pdf. — which promised opportunities for artists in the city. At this stage the top-down approach in Hull (designated UKCoC 2017) had already led to considerable tensions between the special delivery vehicle and the local arts sector.⁶Chris Sharratt, “Hull 2017 accused of sidelining local artists,” a-n The Artists’ Information Company, August 16, 2016, https://www.a-n.co.uk/news/hull- 2017-accused-of-sidelining-local-artists. We were amongst many stakeholders in the city — arts organisations and artists — were invested in the local conditions of production for artists, with the promises of transformation which were made at the time by the newly formed Coventry City of Culture Trust (CCCT, or ‘the Trust’ — the delivery vehicle for UKCoC in Coventry).  

My proposition was to make a film that would observe the city and the unfolding of UKCoC within it, and to exhibit it during UKCoC 2021 as a prompt for public debate. The public relations (PR) messaging from UKCoC focused on creating an image of a city with history looking forwards.⁷Coventry City of Culture Trust, “Our Story,” accessed January 16, 2025, https://coventry2021.co.uk/about/our-story/ I wanted to make a film that would mediate between the PR messaging of the Trust, the realities of UKCoC for its various invested partners and publics, and public perception and collective mood regarding the scheme. I was interested in UKCoC’s image-transformation agenda and how that would play out in the city. I was also curious about Beatriz García’s research,⁸Beatriz García, “‘If everyone says so…’ Press Narratives and Image Change in Major Event Host Cities”, Urban Studies 54, no. 14 (2016): 3178–3198, https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098016674890. which suggested that European Capital of Culture (ECoC) fulfils its claims to positive image change through a circular public relations exercise, with “the ‘city renaissance’ narrative projected by local agencies being echoed, amplified and ultimately legitimized by the press.”⁹Duncan Whitley, “‘We Move Every Heart’ – A Report of Phoenix City Convergence, Coventry Biennial 2019,” Art & the Public Sphere, 9, nos. 1–2 (2020): 226. In García’s analysis, ECoC’s image transformation agenda is realised through a repetition of positive messaging about the city which becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. So, the proposition was to create an artwork which would cast a critical eye over the ways that UKCoC projected the city as part of its image-transformation agenda, and for the artwork to engage with UKCoC’s publics as an alternative space for thinking about it.

Reframing concepts of site-specificity in city-based artworks

MJ: We’ve previously discussed site specificity, particularly how some interpretations focus on the physical location of an artwork. Richard Serra, for example, argued that Tilted Arc would lose its meaning if relocated. He famously stated, “It is a site-specific work and as such is not to be relocated. To remove the work is to destroy the work.”¹⁰Richard Serra, “Tilted Arc’ Destroyed“, Art in America 77, no. 5 (May 1989). Miwon Kwon presents alternative perspectives on site specificity in her book One Place After Another.¹¹Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (MIT Press, 2002), 20. While Kwon acknowledges Serra’s viewpoint in the book’s first part, she later describes a shift toward contextual sites — where artworks are connected to the history and legacy of a place, while also creating new narratives around it.

I believe we can expand on this by considering the temporality of a site and the dynamics between different types of viewers — whether passersby or gallery visitors, for example. Additionally, I’m interested in exploring artworks not just as objects exhibited in gallery spaces, but as active participants in the public sphere of opinion formation. They play a role in shaping how we understand the world through their mediation. I also want to consider how new iterations of a work might influence its meaning, especially when the same concept is presented in a different context and at a different time. This leads me to think of the artwork as an evolving entity in itself, gaining traction as it grows and changes — not just in response to shifting spatial and social dynamics, but also in relation to them. How do you see Phoenix City 2021 engaging with these ideas of site specificity, temporality, and audience dynamics, particularly in relation to its different iterations and changing contexts?

DW: In HYPER-POSSIBLE, Phoenix City 2021 was presented as a gallery film installation. The mode of display in the gallery allowed the space to be adapted to accommodate the needs of the work, with a custom-built screen, a spatial soundtrack mixed in the space using a custom configuration of loudspeakers, and so forth. As a 24-minute film installation, it was designed to be watched seated in a ‘black box’ cinema type environment. In terms of presentation, then, it used the techniques of cinema and the gallery space which pretend to isolate the artwork from the outside. But at the same time, the artwork’s engagement with the city in UKCoC opposed or resisted this hermetic sealing of the gallery space in various ways. Phoenix City 2021 includes sequences of images which focus on new city centre architecture (predominantly the purpose-built student accommodation blocks which over a short space of time have come to dominate the city centre skyline), details of the city centre’s iconic postwar architecture, and documentary images of UKCoC 2021 itself (urban branding, temporary public artworks and audiences at UKCoC 2021 events). The film reflects the city back upon itself and, in doing so, recognises the gallery space as one of the sites through which UKCoC 2021 was to be delivered. 

I think it’s reasonable to suggest that most audiences at that time, whether local or arriving from outside the city, were already engaged in some level of curiosity about Coventry in UKCoC. Coventry had a sustained presence in local, regional and national media across its year as UKCoC,¹²Coventry University, “Evaluation Report Highlights Benefits City of Culture Year Brought to Coventry,” November 22, 2023, https://www.coventry.ac.uk/news/2023/city-of-culture-evaluation-report/. and the Trust’s branding was prominent across the city centre. Phoenix City 2021 anticipated and was designed to operate within this specific context, engaging with the UKCoC scheme, its deployment in the city and ready-primed audiences who were curious to observe the impacts or impressions of UKCoC on the city. At the time, it was difficult to imagine a future for the artwork outside of UKCoC 2021 — except perhaps as a cautionary tale for future UK Cities of Culture! It seemed inextricably tied to a particular confluence of place, histories and identities, and its rationale was centred in the urgency of public debate about the specific moment (of Coventry in UKCoC).

MJ: But in the end the artwork has indeed moved on to new iterations. In what ways did the shift in site and the evolving regeneration of Coventry influence the work’s ability to intervene in the paradoxes of art and regeneration, particularly in relation to the displacement of artist spaces and the city’s cultural future?

DW: Yes, there have been several iterations since 2021. For example, it was presented as part of the arts forum we co-programmed, Arts and the Urban Commons: New Visions for a Phoenix City.¹³“Arts and the Urban Commons: New Visions for a Phoenix City”, talk presented as part of the Spacex Rise Project, Littern Tree, Coventry, UK, June 2021–22. http://spacexrise.com. And prior to that we’d worked together on a small commission, in which you had responded to a “reprise” version of Phoenix City 2021 with the Partisan Social Club poster adapted by Gary Hall, How to Practise Culture-Led Re-Commoning.¹⁴Partisan Social Club and Gary Hall, How to Practise Culture-Led Re-Commoning (Partisan Social Club, 2022), http://partisansocialclub.com. But I wanted to talk about a more recent and unexpected iteration.

In September 2024, myself and the other tenants of the Meter Room artist studios and project space learned in the local online news media that the Meter Room building at 50–64 Corporation Street had been sold by Coventry City Council (CCC) to a private developer.¹⁵Ellie Brown, “Building in Centre of Coventry Could Be Turned into 15 Flats: Plans to Convert 50–64 Corporation Street Have Been Revealed,” September 9, 2024, Coventry Live, https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-news/building-centre-coventry-could-turned-29900468. Several months earlier, CCC workers from the planning department had gained access to Meter Room by drilling the lock to the front door, but we had never got to the bottom of it. At the time of writing, the nine studio holders are in the process of vacating the building. Coventry already suffers from insufficient artist studio provision, a situation which has not improved as a legacy of UKCoC 2021. Arguably, although the city has gained some new or improved cultural spaces in connection with UKCoC, it has lost several ‘grassroots’ arts spaces through the City Centre South regeneration scheme — a shop-front theatre, a shop-front visual arts gallery and a popular collectively run multi-arts space. The City Centre South scheme is Coventry’s largest city centre regeneration project since the 1950’s, and was green-lighted in the context of UKCoC2021 (the developer’s CGI visualisations of how the scheme will look featured in the original version of Phoenix City 2021).¹⁶“Coventry City Centre South,” Coventry City Centre South, accessed January 26, 2025, https://www.coventrycitycentresouth.co.uk/. In this context, a collectively organised exhibition of studio holders’ work planned for late October 2024 became retitled The Final Show.

Phoenix City 2021 (2024 Adaptation) was installed in the 1960’s stairwell of the Meter Room, at 50–64 Corporation Street in Coventry City Centre, in a site-responsive iteration for The Final Show. The film was edited in a new adaptation for the exhibition, recombining scenes, images and sounds in a new configuration to respond to the situation in which the artist-led organisation Meter Room faced an uncertain future, after 13 years based at Corporation St. By the time the exhibition was due to open, we were expecting a visit from a regional television news team who were curious to talk to us about the displacement of the artist studios and project space, since they were already planning a feature on the legacy of UKCoC2021 in Coventry. Thus, the artwork shifted across iterations from a critique of UKCofC and its promise to “use culture-led investment to achieve a legacy of positive cultural, social, environmental and economic impacts” for the city, to a critique of CCC’s approach to city centre regeneration which made little or no efforts to offer grass-roots provision for a creative, cultural city.¹⁷University of Warwick and Coventry University, “Performance measurement and evaluation strategy 2019–2024,” 3, https://warwick.ac.uk/research/partnerships/place-based-research/impact-value/researchresources/2021-pme-strategy-oct19-online.pdf. The iteration at Meter Room used a site-responsive approach to presentation in which the architectural space of the building is prominent, in a reversal of the “black box” gallery model of presentation adopted for the original iteration of the work in 2021.

Counter-atmosphere as audiovisual methodology

MJ: How do you think Phoenix City 2021 works with the UKCoC’s narrative, and how were you thinking about timing, edits, images and sound in the film in relation to its publics? Your film plays with ideas of collective memory and city identity, particularly in its depiction of Coventry’s architectural landscape — both historical landmarks and contemporary developments. Can you say something about how this connects with your thinking about audiences? And how did identifying the intended audience and the conversations the film sought to provoke shape its development as an artwork?

DW: Phoenix City 2021 examines the UKCoC’s schemes “city arisen from the ashes” narrative in a journey through architectural models, an all-night dance club in a disused bingo hall (the Eclipse — often claimed as the UK’s first legal all-night club venue)¹⁸Martin Guttridge-Hewitt, “Watch a new documentary on legendary Coventry club, The Eclipse,” DJ Mag, December 1, 2021, https://djmag.com/news/new-documentary-legendary-coventry-club-eclipse., gleaming student accommodation high-rises, and documentary footage of Coventry in UKCofC. It also features archival footage from the BBC’s One Show in which Coventry was announced UKCofC 2021 on 7 December 2017. The almost wordless film features a prominent soundtrack by electronic musician Abul Mogard, and the participation of a local choir and Brass Band of Central England, in an adaptation of Mozart’s Requiem which opens both iterations of the film. It combines elements of local mythology (a rotating architectural model Coventry’s ‘spinning cafe’ which featured centrally in architect Donald Gibson’s postwar rebuild of Coventry City Centre) with detail and texture of Coventry’s architectural fabric, playing with symbols of Coventry’s particular city identity. These hyperlocal images collide with eerily shimmering images of newly erected city centre buildings and futuristic developer CGIs showing the proposed City Centre South scheme. 

The site and the publics of the artwork are implicit in the thinking through of the workings of these images. The project faced the challenge of speaking to multiple publics: the “cultural tourist” visiting Coventry for UKCoC 2021, local audiences with their roots in the city, and CCCT, the local trust formed to deliver the UKCoC scheme. The film was made with contributions from a number of local participants, including musicians, model-makers, CGI animators, and a local historian, who tells an anecdote in which Donald Gibson’s grand architectural model of Coventry city centre was recovered from a skip outside the council’s offices, only later to be destroyed in a private bonfire. This participatory ethos was central to building engaged local audiences, reflecting a political desire to centre the conversation in and amongst citizens (rather than the people who make decisions about them). I hypothesise that the visitor to the gallery space from outside the city is a curious observer of UKCoC and how it unfolds in the city, and so I imagine these audiences as predisposed to perspectives (especially local) of the scheme. With respect to the Trust, I regarded Phoenix City 2021 somewhat as a Trojan Horse, prominently positioned within UKCoC 2021 via Coventry Biennial. The job of the artwork was to provide an uncompromising critical perspective on UKCoC, whilst using a language which would not foreclose engagement with members of the Trust — and in which might, in the best of cases, achieve the Trust’s endorsement and publicity. I think it achieved this through a strategy of high production values and an immersive, cinematic format of presentation — spectacular enough to appeal to the Trust on the level of aesthetics at least. 

MJ: Working with sound is fundamental to your practice, and we’ve discussed its significance on multiple occasions in relation to your other works. You’ve made me appreciate its complexity, and I now see its potential as a way of communicating through the body — the production of a kind of material affect. For me, it suggests a form of embodied experience that extends beyond conventional linguistic communication, resisting purely allegorical readings or semiotic interpretations of artworks. What you describe highlights the importance of art as having a form of agency that operates outside the familiar channels of publicity or mediated meanings we encounter in everyday life. Perhaps this is where art interventions in urban space can disrupt dominant narratives of the city, offering alternative ways of experiencing and understanding its transformations. 

In relation to Phoenix City 2021, we have described the audiovisual schemas you produced as part of the film as a type of “counter-atmosphere.” I know we were grappling with ways to articulate the in-betweenness of critical reflection and productive disruption — we have tried to describe how the film generates a space that is neither fully oppositional nor entirely absorbed into dominant narratives of urban transformation. This “counter-atmosphere” emerges through the interplay of sound, image, and pacing, shaping an experience that invites audiences to draw on or evoke their own memories or experiences of the city, even if they are encountering Coventry as visitors. Perhaps it offers an opportunity to dwell in ambiguity, to question rather than resolve, and to engage with the city’s shifting identity in ways that resist easy consumption or assimilation into official narratives.

With this in mind, what was your approach to working with sound in relation to the kinds of engagements you were trying to foster with the different publics you’ve mentioned? How did sound contribute to the film’s audiovisual atmosphere—or even counter-atmosphere—in shaping collective memory, city identity, and the experience of Coventry’s urban landscape? I suppose I’m asking this because many projections in public spaces don’t necessarily foreground sound in the way your work does. I think this is an important distinction to address, and it could be useful in relation to other contributions to this special issue.

DW: Yes, sound is absolutely central to the film. The soundtrack by Abul Mogard (AKA Italian composer Guido Zen) gives shape to the film’s scenes or “chapters” through which we observe the “phoenix city”. If we analyse each of these sections which structure the film, their sequential composition is somewhat open-ended. What I mean by this is that the discrete images which compose each scene could be ordered differently without impacting significantly on how the scene is read (compare this to traditional editing in film and television where scenes are organised in specific sequences of shots to portray actions — e.g., man gets out of car, crosses road and enters building). The soundtrack produces the affective atmospheres of these scenes, in synthesis with the textures of the city reflected in the projected image. In conversations with Zen about sound design, we discussed how these audiovisual sensory atmospheres should feel, and strategies to achieve an ambiguity in these scenes which would support and enable the discursive nature of the work. The idea of working with sound design in terms of atmospheres is that these are spaces that the audience can inhabit and think within — as you put it, to dwell in ambiguity and to question but not necessarily resolve. 

In her work on atmospheres of nationalism, Angharad Closs-Stephens cites Derek P. McCormack in defining affective atmospheres as “a quality of environmental immersion that registers in and through sensing bodies while also remaining diffuse.”¹⁹Angharad Closs-Stephens, National Affects: The Everyday Atmospheres of Being Political (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 17. Alberto Duman discusses how atmospheres have been employed in the context of the London Borough of Newham’s regeneration efforts — accelerated by the awarding of the 2012 Olympic Games to London in 2005.²⁰Alberto Duman, “Into the Magenta Haze: Notes on Making Art in the Arc of Opportunity”, in Regeneration Songs: Sounds of Investment and Loss from East London, ed. Alberto Duman, Dan Hancox, Malcolm James and Anna Minton (Repeater Books, 2018), 163–190. Duman describes himself as “breathing an affective haze of pre-emptive future planning” which is “produced through words and images … effectively colonizing the range of future urban scenarios of the city yet to exist by turning heavy-handed fictional accounts into seemingly inevitable outcomes.”²¹Alberto Duman, “Into the Magenta Haze: Notes on Making Art in the Arc of Opportunity,” 164–166. My hypothesis at the outset of the project — supported by anecdotal observation of the Trust’s PR messaging in the campaign to become UKCoC 2021 — was that UKCoC focuses on the production of affective atmospheres as the primary tool to generate public image change for the city, both amongst its citizens and, crucially, amongst publics on national and international scales.²²Beatriz García, “‘If everyone says so…’ Press Narratives and Image Change in Major Event Host Cities”, Urban Studies 54, no. 14 (2016): 3178–3198, https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098016674890.Thinking about the sound-image relations in the film through a scheme of audiovisual, affective atmospheres not only served its open-ended mode of engagement with the audience, but also its method of symbolic and material resistance through the production of counter-atmospheres. 

The final “chapter” of the film features documentary material shot during UKCoC, with sequences of slow-motion, intimate close-ups of audiences at UKCoC2021 events. In this section, Zen’s compositions for the soundtrack had to build a complex, ambiguous atmosphere in which the attitude to UKCoC2021 appears to be diffuse or multifarious; and at the same time, to achieve an apex of emotional intensity in the open-ended finale of the film. The scene treads a delicate balance between a respect for the human subjects of the audience shots, whilst casting a critical eye at UKCoC’s celebratory approach to the arts. In conversations with Zen, we discussed how the soundtrack should allow these elements to co-exist. 

Art, displacement & the politics of urban space

MJ: Returning again to the iteration at Meter Room, how was Phoenix City 2021 adapted there? How did it respond to the displacement of the community of artists based there, and the wider context of UKCoC2021 legacy and CCC’s post-UKCoC city centre regeneration efforts? You’ve mentioned the displacement of other arts organisations and spaces in the city as a result of the City Centre South scheme. Artists, arts organisations, and institutional partners were seeking to collaborate after the Trust had become insolvent in early 2023, leaving the city’s 10-year cultural strategy (2017–2027) rudderless.²³Jessica Murray, “Coventry city of culture trust enters administration,” The Guardian, February 28, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/28/coventry-city-of-culture-trust-enters-administration. How did the Phoenix City 2021 (2024 Adaptation) address a new site, context, and audience?

DW: You’ve summarised the context very well. The displacement of Meter Room and other grassroots arts spaces in the city has been a cause of concern to many of us who have been trying to work together to argue for better provision for artists. In terms of audiences, we were likely to have significantly less visitors than for the iteration at Coventry Biennial. The key audience I had in mind for this iteration centred on the community of local artists and organisations who had shown considerable concern for the situation at Meter Room. Nonetheless, I was also thinking about a wider media reach via social media platforms and the press, the story about the dislocation of Meter Room to make for a residential development having entered the public domain through discussion on Facebook. I was interested in the potential to engage with and influence CCC through the artwork, as part of that wider conversation in the city about provision for artistic communities which we’ve mentioned. 

In terms of the mode of presentation, Phoenix City 2021 (2024 Adaptation) adopted a site-responsive approach, integrated into the physical characteristics of the site. The projection at Meter Room was framed the width of an interior wall of the main stairwell of the building, the return at the top of the stairwell functioning as an improvised viewing platform for the film. The piece was edited to a shorter format, recombining scenes in a new form, with the inclusion of some images which had not featured in the 2021 edit, anticipating the resonances that the site and context would produce with these. The 2024 adaptation included CGI images of The Depot, a council-run affordable recording studio and video production facility for young people in Coventry in the early 1990s. Beyond the ring-road in the background is The Eclipse, an all-night club venue which became a melting pot of cultural production at the heart of the UK’s DIY dance music scene. These hyperlocal references are not nostalgic, rather they can be seen as an argument for spaces for grassroots art and culture. 

Projected directly onto the fabric of 50–64 Corporation Street’s interior, the film feels as if it were “spoken” or “voiced” by the building. Images of a (replica) architectural model of Coventry’s iconic “spinning café” enveloped in flames make flickering reflections on the darkened walls of the stairwell. Likewise, the projection of sound embraced and was inflected by the physical affordances of the building. Sculpted by the diffuse acoustic reflections of the structure, the soundtrack drifted down the stairwell, so that the visitor upon entering at the ground floor journeyed through the disembodied (from the screen) soundtrack to reach the main exhibition. We know that the experience of sound is dependent on space and, since Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan’s work in the 1970s, scholars across disciplines have understood space as produced and shaped by the qualities of sound itself.²⁴George Revill, “How is space made in sound? Spatial mediation, critical phenomenology and the political agency of sound”, Progress in Human Geography, 40, no. 2 (2016): 244. In other words, the acoustic affordances of the architectural space can be seen to be collaborating in the production of the affective, sonorous textures of the film. Thus, in various ways the site collaborated in reproducing anew the audiovisual atmospheres through which the artwork operated.

This iteration of the work was more politically direct, engaging with smaller and more specific publics (relative to the over 23,500 visitors to HYPER-POSSIBLE during Coventry Biennial 2021), but nonetheless aiming to provide a focus for both critical, public conversation and media attention.  It was conceived as a direct response to CCC’s announcement of the redevelopment of 50–64 Corporation Street in the local media, contributing to collective efforts amongst studio holders and the wider creative community to highlight the situation with CCC and the public. In the end, any media impact of the work was frustrated by the threat of early eviction delivered by CCC days prior to the opening of the exhibition, and campaigning voices within the studio holder group were effectively silenced at that point. 

MJ:  This echoes similar instances of gentrification practices, though it represents a more advanced version compared to the original account in say Zukin’s 1982 book Loft Living,²⁵Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Rutgers University Press, 1982). which addresses the processes of gentrification in Manhattan, specifically focusing on how property prices, alongside cultural and economic shifts, played a central role in the transformation of urban spaces. In your account of what happened at Meter Room, we are witnessing a form of what could be called third-wave gentrification, where neoliberal economic agenda shape cultural policy objectives to ensure that the financial benefits for property developers are realised. This results in the folding of arts-based public goods back onto themselves. While the social function of the arts is now recognized and promoted by government policy through initiatives like UKCoC, it fails to protect artists, despite claiming to be for the arts and culture. Instead, it leads to their displacement from the city in an extractive process. While property developers may remain indifferent, this reveals a depoliticizing process embedded within public policy formats. “Depoliticizing”²⁶Mel Jordan and Andrew Hewitt, “Depoliticization, Participation and Social Art Practice: On the Function of Social Art Practice for Politicization,” Art & the Public Sphere 11, no. 1 (2023): 19–36, https://doi.org/10.1386/aps_00066_1. refers to the limitation of democratic processes—when objectives regarding the social and economic benefits of the arts are folded into funding constraints for cultural producers via government quangos, democracy itself is eroded. The issues with cultural initiatives funded by the government for the benefit of artists and society are explored by UK-based artists who use film and projections within city contexts (see for example the work of Neil Gray²⁷Neil Gray, Palimpsest, 2010, video, accessed March 3, 2025,  https://vimeo.com/17402900., Anja Kirschner²⁸Anja Kirschner, Polly II, 2006, Arts Council Collection, video, 30 min., accessed March 3, 2025, https://artscouncilcollection.org.uk/artwork/polly-ii-plan-dockland-revolution. and Chris Paul Daniels & Sam Meech²⁹Chris Paul Daniels and Sam Meech, One Square Mile, 2016, University of Salford Art Collection, video, accessed March 3, 2025, https://artcollection.salford.ac.uk/chris-paul-daniels-and-sam-meech-one-square-mile/.).

Throughout our conversation, we have explored how city artworks act as catalysts, engaging with space, culture, and community to shape broader discussions about urban transformation. I believe that Phoenix City 2021 offers an opportunity to examine these dynamics. Through Phoenix City 2021, we can consider how city-based artworks engage with and influence urban placemaking—not merely as interventions within regeneration narratives but as catalysts for broader conversations about the politics of space, culture, and community. The idea of counter atmospheres is something we arrive at through our attempt to describe what unfolds in Phoenix City 2021. This helps describe moments in the film that neither fully affirm the city’s urban planning nor entirely reject the changes that have taken place. Rather than presenting a direct critique, counter-atmospheres create space for productive reflection on the complexities of neoliberal regeneration, the contradictions of growth and displacement, and the tensions they generate. These moments also allow for the evocation and embodiment of memories, reclaiming and reimagining personal and collective narratives of the city. The concept of counter-atmospheres emerges from our attempt to describe these dynamics, drawing attention to how the film’s making encourages deeper engagement with these tensions. Moreover, Phoenix City 2021 (2024 Adaptation) challenges the efficacy of top-down cultural policy in addressing the realities of urban redevelopment, highlighting how neoliberal agendas—while promising transformation and economic growth—often appropriate the labour of artistic communities, positioning them as central to the identity of the “cultural city” while ultimately marginalising their role in its long-term future.

Mel Jordan

Mel Jordan is an artist, academic, and founding member of the Freee Art Collective and the Partisan Social Club. She is Professor of Art & the Public Sphere at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University. Her research explores the potential of art as a political tool, particularly in shaping public opinion and discourse. She has written on art’s social function, especially in the context of culture-led regeneration. Jordan is principal editor of Art & the Public Sphere Journal (2009).

Duncan Whitley

Duncan Whitley is an artist, filmmaker and sound recordist. His practice synthesizes the languages of cinema, documentary and spatial sound art. His audiovisual works have been exhibited at the likes of Aesthetica Film Festival, Coventry Biennial, Cafe OTO, Flatpack Film Festival, Whitechapel Gallery, The Whitworth, and Emami Art International Film Festival. He has recently completed an MA by Research project Noisemaking, Performing and Listening, as Functions of Opinion Formation in UK Civil Society under Mel Jordan at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University.

You do not have any posts.