Charred and Untowering: Grenfell and the ‘Blackened’

Abstract

The burnt-out Grenfell tower is a symbol of trauma and sacrificed lives. The brutalist block as a technology of trauma, viewed through its mediated depictions, reveals its condemned predicament between slippages in bureaucracy and governance. Through the formal enquiry into the disaster, the Grenfell victims' trauma is revived, replayed and contained within an archive in which victimhood is captured in a number of stages. The charred remains of the tower as a chronotrope of trauma and of lives cut short yields readings into the politics of social housing, gentrification and social displacement. The testimonials from Grenfell are temporally elongated both through the public review but also in the traces of victims' narratives left on social media in real time through flesh witnessing and as an online repository of death narratives. As a tower of trauma and as the forensic evidence of a disaster, Grenfell is part of the iconography of the ‘blackened’ and their necroaesthetics.

Citation

Ibrahim, Y. (2022), "Charred and Untowering: Grenfell and the ‘Blackened’", Technologies of Trauma, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 135-153. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80262-135-820221007