in motion | the build

Hackney Downs Secondary School had been empty for six years when the students of the Bachelor of Arts in Editorial and Advertising Photography arrived in January 2001. What they found was a building, freezing, frozen, stripped of purpose; an environment that had once existed entirely in the service of transforming young people, left instead to fall silently into disrepair.

This film documents what happened next. Shot over the course of one hundred days, it charts the journey from abandonment to the finished exhibition space that opened to the public on the evening of 8 May, tracing the relationship between creative vision and pragmatism, and between curatorial intention and ad-hoc problem-solving.

The soundtrack is Gershwin's I've Got Rhythm. The song's proposition, that rhythm, energy and collective momentum are sufficient to change any situation, is precisely what the film confirms: that regeneration is not only possible, but uniquely within the power of creative people to enact.