Abstract
This essay examines the potential of artistic interventions on billboards to contest narratives of urban regeneration and the communicative dynamics of public spaces. Using Holly Graham’s 2023 Deptford X Festival billboards as a case study, the essay explores how these artworks respond to Deptford’s site-specific context and history of arts-led gentrification. Graham’s works critique the language and strategies of billboard advertising, exposing its complicity in cultural commodification while questioning the dominant narratives that shape perceptions of place. Drawing from historical promotional materials, the billboards challenge the universalising rhetoric of creativity-driven regeneration and foreground the tensions between community, culture, and commerce. Despite their limitations in community engagement and temporality, the billboards offer a powerful critique of public communication and its hierarchies, revealing the paradoxical role of arts organisations within the processes they critique. Ultimately, the essay argues that Graham’s interventions disrupt traditional narratives of place-making and invite a critical rethinking of who authors public space and its futures.
Introduction
This essay takes as its key case study three billboard artworks by Holly Graham to explore questions of public speech, communication, and gentrification. I will analyse how the billboards responded to the site-specific context of Deptford and interrogated narratives around regeneration and the complicity of the arts in gentrification.
I explore how the work, by harnessing the language and medium of billboards, exposes their mechanisms and disrupts the control of their communicative potential. I argue that Graham’s artworks self-reflexively contested dominant narratives and intervened into public spaces of communication even as they came up in tension against their contradictions.
Billboards and public space
Billboards, as the dominant substrate of outdoor advertising, are one of the most prominent platforms of communication in public space. From hand-painted or printed posters to flashing digital billboards, it is almost impossible to move through public space and not encounter one.
John Berger writes about the inundation of “publicity images” we are confronted with in urban public space, taken to be a fully naturalised “total system” which continuously pass us even as we move past (or choose to interact with) them (1972, 130). This implies that whilst we withhold some agency in our engagement with “publicity images”, the sheer quantity and velocity of advertising permeating our surroundings results in a passive reception of messages. They captivate us with highly tactile visual language, arrest our attention with textual efficacy, and enchant the viewer towards consumption. It is the specific characteristics of billboards—enmeshed in a consumptive and capitalist regime, speaking publicly but privately-owned and thus foreclosing the possibility of participation—that artists find as ripe sites for intervention and disruption.
I first encountered artist Holly Graham’s artwork during the 2023 Deptford X Festival. As part of the annual festival, exhibitions, events, and performances take place in the southeast London neighbourhood. I had visited on the last weekend of the festival and was walking circuitously trying to find artworks located in community centres, shops, and basements. Passing Deptford Market Yard, a newly regenerated area of trendy bars and shiny new apartments which contrasted the chaotic energy of the temporary market stalls of the adjacent Deptford High Street, I squinted at the map in my hand.
Figure 1. Saturday market at Deptford Market Yard, 2016. Photo: Farrer Huxley.
Figure 2. Saturday market on Deptford High Street, 2023. Photo: Author.
Looking up, I read, printed in large black and white text, “la Montmartre londinese.” The large billboard took up a prominent spot within the Yard, along a long ramp that led up to the mezzanine level. It appeared to have been cut-out from a larger text—the end of a sentence, marked with a period. On the borders, abstract rectangles of cropped images formed a composition of corners—a bit of a leopard print in one, the top of a roof in another. The colours were pixelated, as if offset in an analogue print— red, magenta, and green forming a visual scratchiness contrasting with the stark, serif text.
Figure 3. Holly Graham, “The Montmartre of London” (2023). Photo: Author.
This was part of Graham’s “London’s Lower East Side | The Montmartre of London | The new Hoxton” (2023), three billboards which collaged fragments from historical promotional material of Deptford. Distributed in a rough triangle marking the outer borders and centre of Deptford, they self-reflexively spoke to the uneasy dynamics between arts, culture, and gentrification in Deptford, and more widely, London.
Site specificity: Deptford and Deptford X
Before I discuss how Graham’s artwork intervened into the communicative structures of billboard advertising, I will first explore the specific spatial-cultural discourse which was integral to its production, presentation, and reception (Kwon 2002).
In the preface to the publication “25 Years of Deptford X / Uncertain times” (2023), local artists expressed sentiments in a 2002 statement that continue to resonate today. They described the vibrant community of artists that Deptford had been home to for years, and that “a reciprocal relationship” between funding bodies and independent artists seemed to be taking place, “a persistence of vision that made the neighbourhood an increasingly worthwhile place to live and work”. However, they expressed that following the Creative Lewisham project established in 2002, a “sanitised and institutionalised future” threatened the local creative scene.
Deptford is a historically working-class area in Southeast London with large communities of Afro-Caribbean and Southeast Asian residents. It is characterised by a prominent artistic community with a decades-long history of experimental practices, community art and activism, and the presence of multiple art spaces and schools [1]. Deptford X, an annual free visual arts festival, was launched in 1998 by a group of local artists and later registered as a charity in 2001. When the first festival took place, Deptford was already being earmarked as the next hub for artists, making the festival inextricable from conversations around culture-led regeneration in the area. Yet, it worked at the edges of the gallery system—often outside of it—to stage art within spaces “at the centre of everyday life” of the local communities, including community centres, shops, markets, residences, and public spaces. Deptford X leaned towards experimental and ephemeral approaches, and often invited artists to respond to the neighbourhood by creating new works for a public.
The 2023 edition marked the festival’s 25th anniversary and framed it as an occasion to reflect on “the organisation’s history and [its] relationship to the changing landscape of Deptford.” A special programme, “Supported”, commissioned three projects by early career Black and People of Colour (BPOC) artists from Lewisham, of which Graham was a recipient. As part of an evaluative look at their history, Deptford X also produced the aforementioned publication which explores the organisation’s struggles with shrinking resources and lack of supportive infrastructure, the regeneration of Deptford, and their commitment to care for artists, audiences, and the locality over the years (Boobis 2023). What is notable about this publication is that it does the above through budgets, reports, administrative documents, and meeting minutes, a rare insight into the internal records of an arts organisation.
Figure 4. Nathalie Boobis, 25 Years of Deptford X / Uncertain Times: A case history of a London art organisation (2023).
Figure 5. “Deptford X income sources”, 82-83.
This case study thus provides an illuminating look into how the transformation of Deptford over the years parallels wider movements of capital-led gentrification in post-industrial working-class areas in London, along with the co-optation of culture, participation, and community in this rhetoric. Graham’s billboards thus operate in and respond to this specific context.
“la Montmartre londinese”
The uneasy relationship between Deptford X and Deptford’s gentrification is one that is fully acknowledged by the organisation. Director Nathalie Boobis reflects on a 2001 report, where the festival was flagged a “model regeneration project”—retrospectively, “the festival helped to make Deptford appealing to developers and in turn it received cash and space”, but ultimately resulted in the loss of affordable housing, art spaces and studios (2023, 20). In fact, Charles Landry, author of “The Creative City” (2000) [2], was commissioned to produce a 2001 report which birthed the Creative Lewisham Agency that has since transformed the borough’s cultural policies. This report was also cited in the 2001 festival’s print programme, intertwining the early interests of both organisations (Boobis 2023).
I argue that Graham’s works can be seen to directly reference and critique these shifts by harnessing the language and medium of billboards and utilising found texts from Deptford X’s archive. Positioned along busy streets, billboards use direct and reductive text to capture the viewer’s attention, sometimes in the timeframe of a fleeting glance. Short pithy slogans are often utilised, enlarged, and dramatically positioned. Employing this visual language, Graham magnified specific found phrases as headers. Smaller text provided their citations from travel magazines and articles, alongside a patchwork of visual textures from the sources. Through the simple act of reproducing marketing rhetoric, Graham exposes the strategies adopted by advertising agencies and places them in tension with their environments.
Figure 6. Holly Graham, “The Montmartre of London” (2023). Photo: Deptford X 2023, Katarzyna Perlak.
The first billboard mentioned in my earlier encounter referenced Paris’ famous cultural district, where artists gathered and worked in the late 19th to 20th century due to low rent prices. Today, Montmartre is one of Paris’ most popular neighbourhoods, where tourists flock to experience its ‘bohemian charm’. Notably, Graham leaves the phrase “la Montmartre londinese” untranslated as found text from the source magazine, Vogue Italia, imbuing it with an air of cultural sophistication associated with both Italian and French culture. Situated in the heart of Deptford, where the bustling thoroughfare and street market on Deptford High Street meets the regenerated Deptford Market Yard, this contrast felt particularly jarring and out-of-place—intentionally used to great effect.
Figure 7. Holly Graham, “London’s Lower East Side” (2023). Photo: Deptford X 2023, Katarzyna Perlak.
The second billboard was located directly next to New Cross Gate station, the western boundary of the neighbourhood. “London’s Lower East Side” referenced New York City’s historic immigrant working-class neighbourhood, which some authors suggest underwent three to five waves of gentrification, in part spurred by the influx of artists in the early 1980s that priced out and displaced residents (Smith and DeFilippis 2008, Campbell 2021). Graham’s choice of neighbourhoods mirrors Deptford’s own history and transformations.
The third billboard was located on Creek Road and marked the northeastern boundary of Deptford. Derived from a 2008 article, it proclaimed Deptford as “the new Hoxton”—referencing the East London neighbourhood which was considered the “wild centre of the YBA (Young British Artists) boom”, and followed a comparable trajectory from working class neighbourhood to gentrified tech and creative district (The Guardian 2018).
Figure 8. Holly Graham, “The new Hoxton” (2023). Photo: Deptford X 2023, Katarzyna Perlak.
Figure 9. Graham’s three billboards as marked on the Deptford X Festival Map: 3A, 3B and 3C (Deptford X, 2023).
Figure 10. Locations of the billboards as marked on Google Maps (marked in red), with the neighbourhoods of Deptford (marked in blue) and the adjacent New Cross (marked in orange). The billboards were placed at points of high traffic and significant boundary markers of the neighbourhood.
Whilst on one hand, we can consider the co-optation of arts and culture and the complicity of artists in the advertising of Deptford, the branding of urban spaces here takes on the universalising claims of place marketing towards “a neoliberal celebration of a particular manifestation of ‘creativity’” (Pratt 2011). In privileging a particular type of culture, one that brings the most income and appeals to a cosmopolitan and international demographic, it disavows the very diversity and particularities of the local arts community which are disproportionately excluded from this vision of creativity.
This is evident in arts funding—even as Deptford was designated a cultural quarter, it was not accompanied by substantial funding or long-term support. The festival faced fluctuating resources over the years and was “observed as a dynamic entity that had the ability to shift, change and adapt of its own accord (in other words, struggle – as with most of the arts, community, and charity sectors)” (Boobis 2023, 22). The perception of artists and arts organisations as adaptable in their ability to work around the variable availability of funding and spaces meant that Deptford X struggled to stay afloat even as major commercial development projects such as Convoys Wharf and the Old Seager Distillery brought in new builds [3].
Small cultural organisations and charities like Deptford X also spend scant resources trying to build relationships with well-resourced developers, who “gain from their presence but fail to honour this power imbalance” (Boobis 2023, 48). Graham’s artwork thus prompts the viewer to rethink the marketed narratives of Deptford and question the imbalanced dynamic between property developers who harness the cultural capital of artists and the actual benefits that return to the community.
Speaking in public
Figure 11. Holly Graham, “London’s Lower East Side” (2023). Photo: Deptford X 2023, Katarzyna Perlak.
Pertinent to this case study is also the question of who gets to speak in public space. Cultural geographer Thomas Dekeyser’s writing on subvertising proves helpful in thinking about how subversive practices into advertising mediums such as billboards can challenge control over their communicative potential (2020). Discussing the production of a sense of “sacredness” in the separation and removal of places or things from common use, rendering it accessible only to a privileged few, he describes how power in public space is enforced via exclusionary use of billboard space. Challenging the dominant control of order in usurping the billboard is thus to directly enter that space of communication.
However, unlike Dekeyser’s subvertisers, Graham’s work was not executed through illicit means. The billboards were supplied by Jack Arts, the arts branch of commercial agency Build Hollywood, which offers billboards for artistic partnerships for subsided costs (Boobis, email message to author, 20 December 2023). As such, one could argue that the work operates within accepted boundaries of speech as determined by the commercial owner and fails to break out of its hegemonic management.
Nevertheless, while perhaps not as outwardly transgressive and disorderly, I argue that Graham’s billboards generate a critique which is even more effective in its subtlety and critique. Working specifically with the billboard’s “site”, they decode its conventions to expose its hidden operations and challenge its mechanisms (Kwon 2002, 14). It brings to fore what often goes unquestioned in the public mind—instigating a process of questioning and triggering a different kind of dialogue between the billboard and the viewer.
Graham’s artworks follow a lineage of public art billboards [4] which are tactically used to dissent public spaces dominated by commercial interest. In occupying the space of advertising, the strategic insertion of posters that masquerade as official adverts expose them as clichés of place marketing. Ringing hollow and empty, they prompt viewers to question what it means to be compared to these “model” neighbourhoods—all three having undergone arts-facilitated gentrification and displacement of communities. Furthermore, Graham’s background in printmaking, involving the replication, duplication and circulation of images and text, comes through in her mobilisation and reassembly of existing voices from source materials to redirect their meaning. Through a vagueness in their linguistic register as fragmentary slogans, the viewer is prompted to question what they are being sold or persuaded of, and whether these proclamations (“Deptford is the new Hoxton?”) ring true.
This citational use can also be seen in an accompanying text work Graham produced for the festival. “On the verge of something very big” (2023) similarly collages heterogenous materials from press articles, festival pamphlets and visitor feedback in the form of an A3 poster and newsprint pamphlet. It reads like satirical prose (“One day it will be someone’s penthouse… but for now it’s ours”) but is entirely constructed of citations and quotes from archival documents. She asks, quoting a feedback form response: “Is Deptford X a willing agent in that process of gentrification – Or can it challenge some of the forces at play?”
Figure 12. Holly Graham, “On the verge of something very big” (2023). Photo: Author.
Both works are made more powerful by retaining the original language and forms of these texts, down to the font choices, graphic elements, and grainy reproductions. Graham thus critiques the use of outdoor advertising to sell place-marketing narratives and questions its dominant and exclusionary authorship in generating imaginations of a neighbourhood such as Deptford.
Truly disruptive?
Despite the powerful potential of the artwork to speak to site-specific histories, culture, gentrification, and outdoor advertising, in practice, I observed it lacked an extended engagement with the community.
Firstly, the framework of the festival constrained the artwork with a temporality that reduced its radical potential to disrupt the flows of everyday life. The time-limited duration of the festival meant that it was quickly returned to a regular billboard after ten days.
Secondly, because the festival is a recurring annual event, Deptford residents would already have the expectation that the festival was running in that period. Furthermore, the festival has historically not been a stranger to artistic interventions into public sites of visual communication—past editions have placed artworks on billboards, bridges, walls, construction hoarding, and even refuse trucks. Lastly, as an ‘official’ commission, it meant that visitors were actively seeking out the billboards, much like I was, and thus framing it within the parameters of the festival.
Figure 13. “London’s Lower East Side” billboard, returned to its original state, December 2023. Photo: Author.
I questioned the efficacy of the artwork in agitating the familiar spaces of everyday life. During my experience of visiting the billboards, it was mostly ignored by residents, who perhaps dismissed them among the hundreds of posters that already densely covered the surfaces of the neighbourhood. Yet, it must be acknowledged that my visit was in the specific context of the festival, and it is not possible to say if it, in fact, had significant impact on the local community.
Nevertheless, in the context of this essay’s analysis, I personally observed the billboards to trigger a subtle, yet powerful, intervention into public space. It is also important to note that Graham, as a female, early-career, BPOC artist, was commissioned as part of “Supported”, initiated in 2019 to invite a broader range of perspectives outside of the historically predominantly white artist line-up of the festival. This reflected a concern over its lack of diversity and relevance to Deptford’s communities (Boobis 2023), as well as the unequal access of different artistic communities to platforms of participation and visibility. Additionally, the informal pressures that disproportionately marginalise the contributions of disempowered social groups further exclude access from privatised media that constitute the material support for the circulation of views in public space (Fraser 1990, 64).
I hence argue that Graham’s works potently question not just who gets to speak out and make claims in public space, but also generate dominant narratives and futural imaginations of a heterogenous neighbourhood such as Deptford. Thus, even as a transient work operating within the parameters of the festival, Graham’s artworks interrupted the space of the billboard to effectively interrogate the authorship and communicative potential of the community, and represent a critical counter-propositional voice within a public sphere striated by hierarchies of class, race, and gender.
Conclusion
Figure 14. Holly Graham, “The new Hoxton” (2023). Photo: Deptford X 2023, Katarzyna Perlak.
Despite its shortcomings, Graham’s billboards engaged in a self-reflexive mode where both the artist and the festival were fully aware of the complexities and contradictions of their context and positionality. On one hand, it harnessed the billboard to intervene into public spaces of communication and redirected meaning through the strategic mobilisation and reassembly of source materials. At the same time, it also critiqued their own position of complicity as artists and art organisations implicated in urban regeneration and gentrification, acknowledging the history of Deptford X.
Whilst its actual engagement with the community in the festival’s context might have been lacking, I have shown how Graham’s billboards still efficaciously intervened in public space even as they came up in tension against its contradictions. I have examined that it does so by responding to the complex and site-specific dynamics of arts-led regeneration of Deptford and the history of Deptford X; illuminating the disproportionate impacts of a universalising notion of creativity on local communities; contesting the communicative potential of public spaces; and ultimately questioning who gets to make claims and generate public imaginations of a neighbourhood in flux.
This essay was written for "Art in the Public Sphere" as part of MA in Material and Visual Culture (Anthropology) at UCL.
Footnotes
[1] These include the Albany Theatre, A.P.T., and Cockpit Studios, as well as art schools Goldsmiths University and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.
[2] Landry’s “The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators” (2000) is often cited as one of the pivotal books to convert the idea of the “creative city” into a cohesive policy proposal. Positioned as a “toolkit”, it proposed a paradigm that emphasised the potential transformative power of “creativity” in cultural planning and urban governance. Together with Richard Florida’s notion of the “creative class” (2002), the “creative city” discourse had a considerable influence on urban development projects globally.
[3] These developments also had a major impact on existing residents, particularly visible in the cost of housing in Lewisham. According to a 2019 Strategic Housing Market Assessment report, across the Borough, median house prices increased 312% from 2000 to 2018, while median rental prices increased by 40%. The rate of growth is significantly higher than those experienced across neighbouring boroughs and London boroughs as a whole. Comparing housing prices with gross earnings, the report concludes that Lewisham was consistently less affordable than the London-wide average (12.99x earnings in 2018) at a median ratio of 13.94 and a lower quartile ratio of 15.16.
[4] For a major retrospective exhibition on artist billboard interventions, see “Billboard: Art On the Road” (28 May – 18 September 1999) at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and accompanying publication.
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