First look: Utopia exhibition, Roundhouse

Film-maker Penny Woolcock and designers Block9 have transformed the Roundhouse in Camden with an artwork that presents a dark vision of our city. Samuel Fishwick is given an exclusive preview
Digging deep: Gideon Berger and Penny Woolcock, with their installation (Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd

Camden’s Roundhouse is a crime scene. Smoke billows in the main space from a council waste bin; a crumpled pick-up truck sits half-way through the window display of a mocked-up bookshop. “We have to change this,” tuts the installation’s creator Penny Woolcock, stepping over a police cordon to adjust a speaker. “It needs to be much louder.”

Google Robert Owen, read Sir Thomas More, make your own conclusions — this is an unlikely Utopia. The Roundhouse’s summer installation is Woolcock’s brainchild, built with Block9, the set designers and builders behind several iconic installations at Glastonbury.

It’s a desiccated parody of Camden, textured with stories recorded from around the borough: a sex worker’s voice echoes in a public phone box; a boy from Queen’s Crescent recalls chasing classmates with a knife to scare them into handing over their phones. “Baby formula, flour, diesel, rat poison,” mutters a voice in the darkness, rattling off a shopping list of ingredients used to cut cocaine. “That’s enough to put you off, right?” says Woolcock.

Short but tough, the 65-year-old film-maker’s career has been spent documenting real-life dystopias, with award-winning work on Birmingham’s gangs (1 Day and 1 Mile Away) and a semi-fictional account of life on the breadline in Leeds (Tina Goes Shopping).

Her films have not been without their controversies: several Birmingham cinemas refused to show 1 Day citing security concerns. “I did briefly consider doing something artsy and craftsy for this,” says Woolcock. “But then I thought no, that’s not what I do. Let’s go get into trouble again.”

Each story means something personal to Woolcock. As we pick our way through the battered storefront of T More’s Bookshop, a copy of Plato’s Republic sits open on a lectern, a sound system crackling overhead. The narrator, who Woolcock now knows well, was jailed for taking part in the London riots, and said it was reading Plato that liberated him.

Woolcock spent days with her interviewees to create a Camden soundscape, meeting ex-offenders through the charity Only Connect, dementia patients through the retirement home Henderson Court and others through friends of friends. Despite her middle-class vowels, she never felt intimidated. “I like being out of my comfort zone,” she says, “I like asking the questions other people are too polite to ask.”

Sound and vision: Woolcock interviewed dementia patients and ex-offenders to create a Camden soundscape for Utopia (Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd

If Utopia’s audio is breathtaking, the set is spectacular. A totemic pyramid of cardboard boxes stretches over the stage at the installation’s centre like a monument to self-storage, each box branded with a label: “desirability”, “glamour”, “happiness”. “They’re the things we think we’re getting when we buy a product,” says Woolcock. “It’s a temple to consumerism, with nothing inside.”

To the left, near the entrance, a two-and-a-half-minute video on consumerism is projected onto a plastic sheet. The clips of Black Friday shoppers, the London Riots and workers crushed at the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh are almost indistinguishable from each other.

Woolcock says it’s all about making connections. “I’ve met so many boys who told me that they looted in the riots because this was the stuff they were told them they needed,” she says. “The shop window was open, I couldn’t afford it, and so I took it. Congratulations, I wanted what you wanted me to want.”

Behind this a “production plant” contains yet more branded boxes. Workbenches are littered with cultural detritus. Woolcock picks up French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation from one of them. Another audio recording accompanies it. “He talks about hyper-real worlds and copies without originals,” she explains. “Celebrities famous for being famous, lives spent on social media, all of us becoming less authentic.”

I wonder what her reaction will be when the first wave of #Utopia photos hit Instagram. “Well, I’m a hypocrite,” she laughs. “I’m standing here in my Nike trainers with a smart phone in my hand.”

There’s humour here too. A copy of The Matrix on DVD — which draws heavily on Baudrillard’s ideas — sits next to the book, accompanied by a case of blue and red pills. “I think Utopia is a bit like The Matrix, to be honest,” Woolcock says. “People will get it or they won’t, but either way they’ll have fun.”

Even without the philosophy crash course, there’s a lot going on in Utopia. Twenty-five crew members have buzzed around the site for the last week, moving 3,155 cardboard boxes, two cars, 297 palettes, 15 tonnes of rubber and 11,000 books into place. Twenty-four hours before the opening, there are still bugs to fix.

Stephen Gallagher, 43, and Gideon Berger, 37, the masterminds behind Block9, aren’t worried. Compared with working at Glastonbury, it’s a walk in the park. The designers sets at the festival — from the wildly anarchic NYC Downlow in 2007 to its “slightly straighter older brother” London Underground, a sinister 50ft tower block with a Tube train crashed into it — require a small army of 500 volunteers to put together.

The legendary crew bar Maceo’s — an invite-only backstage area where DJs play in a soundproof articulated lorry — has grown up around the sets. “It keeps going well after the curfew closes everything else because it doesn’t disturb anyone,” says Berger, who went to his first Glastonbury aged 14. “Mick Jagger and Kate Moss have been, and Skrillex, Neneh Cherry and Florence + the Machine have all done sets. We’re like a big, extended, relatively dysfunctional family.”

Berger’s gravelly east London accent is testament to his 20 years of raving, squatting and time on the road with travellers. Block9, he explains, was born after a visit to the US festival Burning Man 15 years ago, where Berger, who is gay, was blown away by the presence of gay crews with their sound systems, rigs and big sets built out in the Nevada desert.

“These were politically-switched on excellent homos doing things on a huge scale,” he says. “Back in the UK there was zero gay presence on the festival scene.” Block9 soon remedied that: they secured a pitch on the Glastonbury site, and developed a reputation for jaw-dropping constructions and high-end electronic music.

“Night clubs and discos, we invented that stuff,” says Berger of gay culture. “That’s the stamp I wanted to put on Glastonbury. Punchdrunk have staked their claim on immersive theatre, Secret Cinema have staked their claim on interactive film experiences and we build and create hybrid spaces around the musical experience.”

Gallagher is more straight-laced, with a wife, two children and a self-confessed preference “for spreadsheets rather than 6am finishes”. His father, who worked in construction, used to drag him to building sites in Birmingham which is where, he says, he got the itch to design and create. He is, as they put it, the Yin to Berger’s Yang, shooting down problems on site while Berger, a DJ with a show on Soho Radio, tinkers with the music production.

At the Roundhouse, Berger is firing up the stage lights in preparation for the first Utopia: Live Lates series, with DJ Honey Dijon arriving from New York tomorrow for a night Berger promises will be “deep, and sleazy, and supercharged”.

Russell Brand is set to speak tonight, with Charlotte Church and Owen Jones due to outline their Utopian proposals later in the series. “For the first time in my life Russell’s made politics interesting to people who can’t stand Prime Minister’s Questions,” says Woolcock, who met Brand through her lodger. “Not everything he says makes sense, but why should it? He’s not editing himself. One of the reasons that the last election was so boring was that everyone was frightened of offending some focus group.”

Woolcock wants the alternative voices to be heard, from Brand to her boy reading Plato. A number of young people have secured roles at the Roundhouse working on Utopia: Live Lates, and Woolcock rushes over to greet them as they get their first view of the finished work they helped build. There’s nothing fake here — it’s real love.

“Utopia is possible if we just think differently,” says Woolcock. “There has to be another way of thinking about each other. Otherwise, we’re sunk aren’t we?”

Utopia and Utopia: Live Lates are at The Roundhouse, NW1 ( 0844 482 8008, roundhouse.org.uk), until August 23

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