Painted high up on the wall of the old fire station on the Peckham Road, there is a slogan: ‘AT A DISTANCE TO THE FOREGROUND’.
You have to look up to see it, and that’s part of the point. You lift your eyes from what’s right in front of you to something deliberately placed ‘at a distance’. It’s the kind of double focus we need to halt climate catastrophe. It makes me think about the connections between my immediate, daily life and the wider world.
The current Lagos Peckham Repeat exhibition at the South London Gallery also invites you to do just that. In an installation by Ndidi Dike, you look through transparent images of London – of shops on Rye Lane, the ‘Afro Foods’ grocers and the Peckham arch – to a heap of gleaming white shoeboxes bearing the logos of Shell, Unilever and the mining company Glencore. How exactly are the desirable consumer objects in those boxes made? Where and how are their raw materials extracted?
Opposite, photographs by Christopher Obuh show giant concrete pipes and half-built towers in a desert. Yet there is no sign of human life – is the project mid-construction or abandoned? Three million cubic metres of sand have been dredged from the Atlantic for a planned luxury city within the state of Lagos, now blamed for creating the coastal erosion it was supposed to hold back.
A glowing mosaic of subtle colours ripples overhead. Up close, you realise that it is made of hundreds of plastic bottles filled with discoloured water. The piece, by Seyi Adelekun, is at once beautiful and disturbing: echoes of chandeliers, plastic waste, polluted water.
The exhibition explores connections between Nigeria and Peckham, a lived reality for thousands of people who hold both places in mind every day. As Fehinti Balogun says in his film Can I Live?, people of the global majority are bearing the brunt of climate breakdown, despite having done least to cause it. The history of systemic racism means this plays out in the UK too. In 2021, young south Londoners from the Choked Up group put up warning road signs pointing out that people of colour ‘are more likely to live in an area with illegal air pollution levels’.
We need to look up. I’m grateful to the artists who help us shift our focus, right here on Peckham Road.
You can see Lagos Peckham Repeat at SLG until 8 October. Can I Live? is showing at events – or organise your own screening www.complicite.org/work/can-i-live/