The London Traveler

The East End seems to have an attraction for strange houses. First there was the Rachel Whiteread ‘House’ in Mile End – a cast of the inside of a complete terraced house. You could see the fireplaces, the windows, the bookshelves – but all turned inside out, as it were.

Now Sumer Erek is building a house out of recycled newspapers in Gillett Square, Dalston (close to Dalston Kinsland railway station). It’s a comment on the menace all of us know – the abandoned free papers that flap across our streets and rustle in the gutters like slightly sinister pigeons, and get grubbier and grubbier and more and more torn until finally they biodegrade, or are picked up by a street sweeper.

Instead of meeting this fate, all the newspapers Sumer can get his hands on will be rolled up tightly into little tubes and used to create the walls of the house.

But it’s also a meditation on just what a house is. The newspaper will fill up the houses’ ’shell’ from the inside (actually my father’s ‘den’ looks a bit like that…) so that like Rachel Whiteread’s house, it asks us what’s most important about a house – what we see from the outside, or what we fill it with? And what are we filling it with actually? On one level, words – on another, waste. And when the ’shell’ comes off, you’ll see the newspapers forming the entire structure – a delicate, vulnerable structure compared to the shed-like ’shell’.

The participation of the public is also an important part of the work’s meaning.  Visitors can put their own ‘news’ into the newspaper – the house is made not just by an artist, but by anyone who cares to drop by.  I wonder how many people will try to drop by every day to see how the house is getting on?

Though work on collecting papers and planning the work has been going on for some time, the actual process of building will start on March 3rd and the house – in various states of completion – will be on show till the 10th of March.

Now I’ve asked… but I still haven’t found out quite what’s going to happen to the house on March 10th. Maybe they should take a vote; burn it? recycle it? or apply for planning permission for ‘low impact affordable housing in Hackney’? After all, it’s an eco-house – with great insulation!

(Photo of the Newspaper House team, above,  by Emra Islek)

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