The Balfron Project is a large-scale pho­to­graphic event to be staged at the Grade II lis­ted build­ing the Balfron Tower in Tower Hamlets, London. Shot on film with a large format still cam­era by artist Simon Terrill, the event will res­ult in a mural sized pho­to­graph present­ing both this icon of 1960s New Brutalism and its con­nec­tion to the lives of the people who inhabit it today. The project’s aim is to engage with those who live inside this tower as sim­ul­tan­eously par­ti­cipant, sub­ject and audi­ence. Residents are invited to par­ti­cip­ate by choos­ing how they wish to rep­res­ent them­selves within the lar­ger pic­ture. A time and date will be set, res­id­ents informed and offered the oppor­tun­ity to participate.

The Balfron Project is a devel­op­ment and new depar­ture of Simon Terrill’s Crowd Theory work. Crowd Theory is an ongo­ing series of pho­to­graphic per­form­ance events explor­ing ideas of com­munity and the nature of crowds. Each sta­ging involves up to 400 people who are par­tic­u­lar to the site of that pro­duc­tion. For each event, a time and place has been spe­cified and a group of people are assembled, but their spe­cific actions on-site are left undir­ec­ted and uncon­trolled.  Through this ran­dom orches­tra­tion of bod­ies in site-specific ven­ues, Crowd Theory seeks to expand upon accep­ted defin­i­tions and per­cep­tions of what it is that con­sti­tutes a ‘com­munity’ and how this con­verges with the notion and implic­a­tions of a ‘crowd’. The sub­sequent mural-sized pho­to­graphs that remain as evid­ence of these encoun­ters cre­ate a vis­ion of what hap­pens when large groups of people gather at sites of sig­ni­fic­ance to them­selves, how they choose to be rep­res­en­ted within these loc­a­tions and how in turn, these spaces poten­tially rep­res­ent and define their inhabitants.

via About The Balfron Project.