Walking the Elephant: Drawing as enactment of community

Abstract

The Elephant and Castle neighbourhood in London is well known as a centre for the Latin American community in the UK. The drastic demolition of the site threatens their continued presence. This article chronicles my work as an illustrator on a project that sought to represent this migrant community, their vibrancy, and vitality on the cusp of the site’s erasure. Through a series of participatory, creative workshops a range of illustrative documents were produced that, ultimately, became archival records. Working on the project enabled a reflection on the role of the illustrator in the context of cultural devastation, and retrieval and preservation of the relationship between migrants and the spaces they occupy. This gave rise to a deeper set of questions about the nature of community as such. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical work on community and Hannah Arendt’s writing on the public realm, I argue that this illustration project visualises and materialises experiences and expressions of community at a moment when this sociality was itself under threat.