Serpentine Gallery, London
The Oscar-winning director’s silent survey of the burnt tower makes this disaster of incompetence and corruption painful to witness – but impossible to ignore
At first, we hear birdsong as the screen lights up. The approach begins at London’s edge, passing over a mosaic of housing developments and the last fields, giving way to golf courses and playing fields and factory estates. There are traffic sounds and distant sirens, a helicopter passing over, its sound fading with it. Our approach is slow and low in the early winter afternoon, the distant horizon muffled by pollution. Here comes Wembley stadium, there on the right, just before we make a small turn and head over Willesden and Kensal Green, crossing the Westway.
Distantly at first, barely visible between other towers, a blackened smudge hoves into view and the sound dies. A red underground train passes through a station and the red cabin of an external lift descends the side of the blackened, burned-out tower. Sunlight penetrates the interior through the spaces where windows once were, falling on bare floors and the cavernous spaces that used to be carpeted and where interior walls, kitchens, beds, furniture and decorations once stood. Daylight excavates the gloom. Lattices of internal metal scaffolding shore up ceilings and workers are occasionally glimpsed among it all. Then they’re gone. We do not linger either, as the camera makes its rounds. And all around are other buildings, other windows looking on.
