A 45min creative presentation incorporating personal storytelling, film, music and soundscape. This multi-media performance explores the consequences of gentrification, eviction and late-stage capitalism, and new potential futures to Rebuild the Commons!

Traversing various art forms, these intimate stories weave together to transform a tragedy of corporate co-option into the seed of a transition movement based on community re-commonning.Their performance reveals how attitudes, behaviours and actions are corrupted by the pressures of late-stage capitalism. The collective trauma, economic rupture and negative consequences from these events are still being felt today. In the wake of the dispersion and diaspora of Hamilton House, people lost their place of work, their jobs and their social nexus. As a consequence of this, some people also lost their homes, their sense of self and their mental health. The films feature the voices of former Hamilton House community members and ruminate on the invisible forces and practical actions that influenced the outcome of ten years of community-led regeneration. They centre the magic of creativity and optimism and seek to invert the power attributed to land ownership from corporate behemoths to community initiatives. They were produced as imaginal tools for movement building as part of Coexist’s new project to re-common community health and wealth – The BristolCommons.The presentation will conclude with a reading of its draft manifesto: Rebuild TheCommons!This quote, anonymously gathered from conversations with community members in the lead-up to the eviction, forms one of its founding principles: “Artists do not cause gentrification, developers do!”

Danny Balla is an artist-facilitator, educator and social justice activist, as well as a Director of Coexist – a Bristol-based social enterprise renowned for growing creative community spaces, pioneering new economy projects and fostering community-led resurgence. In 2008, Coexist opened Hamilton House in Stokes Croft, Bristol – as a pilot ‘Centre for Excellence in Sustainable Community’. Through careful co-production and collaboration it became one of the UK’s largest and most successful community-cultural hubs, which it managed for ten years before the organisation’s much-publicised eviction, along with over 500 artists, social enterprises and charities, in December 2018. Having been evicted from their house in Bristol a year earlier, and their family from their home of 30 years the following summer, Danny has a hat-trick of experiences that have led them to explore new strategies for community resilience and rejuvenation.