Collecting Ends

Throughout November and December 2019, a shop front in the iconic Portobello Arcade was transformed into a West London living room and live collecting space curated by local young people in collaboration with FerArts.

West London living room

The “Museum of (West) London” pop-up exhibition was visited by nearly 800 people during its eight-day run at the FerArts studio in North Kensington in February 2020

Each young person working on the project came together to bring objects from their own homes, as well as sourcing bought items from Portobello and Golborne markets, to dress the living room as an authentic, West London home.

Friends, family and residents from the community were then invited into the living room to record their West London stories from the Curating London sofa.

To prepare for the launch of the living room space, we embarked on workshops to explore how we can become curators in our neighbourhoods and authentically document our communities.

The project also experimented with giving small grants to young people to develop their own collecting initiatives. Three such micro-projects emerged out of this process: Beauty Treatment by Alia Hassan, Alyssa-Victoria Isip and Sam Campbell; West Side Stories by Prime Isaac; and the Living Rooms Project by Rajaa Bouchab and Azhar Benalhachmi. Each of these aimed to record and document contemporary West London life from the perspectives of young residents.

At the end of the project, collected materials were showcased to the public in a week-long exhibition at the FerArts studio, which became a pop-up “Museum of (West) London”.

This final exhibition was the culmination of a series of creative workshops, which helped us explore what and how we would like to collect in our own ‘ends’.