Twilight City - Rewire

A young woman, Octavia, receives a letter from her mother, who wants to return to London, after 10 years in Dominica, to live with her daughter again. The old resentments, hurt, and anger that Octavia thought had been buried by the past resurface. Paul Gilroy reminisces about his earliest memory of London. He was walking with his father through the Docklands – before its glossy redevelopment – looking at all of the old buildings, the strange symbols daubed on the walls, and wondered what the great fire of London did to the city. He asked his father many questions that he couldn’t answer. Gail Lewis grew up around Kilburn and Harrow. She remembers the neighbourhood as derelict. George Shires, another interviewee, talks about the images of London he grew up with at his school in Zimbabwe and how they didn’t align with his impression of London as a 12 year old immigrant: dark, dull, and restrictive, with a disorienting lack of smell. Twilight City is composed of many of these kinds of encounters and anecdotes, mapping out a different representation of life in England’s capital city. 

Twilight City is presented as part of a focus programme on the work by sound composer and artist Trevor Mathison, who is part of the Black Audio Film Collective, a pioneering arts initiative founded in 1982 whose ground-breaking experimental works engaged with Black popular and political culture in Britain and lack and Asian diasporas.