City of Stories will forever be close to my heart. I collaborated with Zohra Chiheb from Levitt Bernstein to contribute to the London Festival of Architecture. This year highlighted rising levels of homelessness in London.
I worked with charities CRASH and Kairos Community Trust to create a hard-hitting large scale cardboard installation. The one day event took place in the courtyard of Levitt Bernstein’s studios. An 80 square meter 1:50 cardboard model of Dalston was suspended from scaffolding, with powerfully emotive stories about addiction and recovery falling from it. Residents of Kairos Community Trust, a charity which is dedicated to helping homeless men and women with drug and alcohol problems, helped to create the installation, cutting out hundreds of cardboard skyline silhouettes while sharing their stories with the team. The stories were recorded, laser-etched onto hand crafted Jacob’s ladders and hung from the cardboard city on brightly coloured ribbons – the concept being that, when the city turns upside down, stories will fall out.
“What started off as an incredibly ambitious idea from Hanna resulted in an emotional journey for everyone involved”
