Spiraling Grief and Steve McQueen’s Grenfell

Grenfell Tower, July 19, 2017.

We are not on the ground. Aerial footage of London rolls beneath us, gliding through the still and clarifying light of winter sun. The camera’s vantage point from a helicopter surveils the city below with a clinical omniscience that feels almost eerie, cruising through the air as if weightless and encountering no resistance, no drag. Birdsong weaves into the continuous hum of traffic. In the gallery space where this footage is being played, the screen itself is suspended within a void of darkness, already producing within the viewer the slightest sense of vertigo, the disorientation of feeling airborne.

Decisively, we pivot west. An empty Wembley Stadium enters the frame: at this height, its massive exterior LED displays, animated with the hollow effervescence of corporate logos, are rendered inconsequentially small. Then, the charred, blackened structure of Grenfell Tower appears on the horizon, growing larger and larger. Our trajectory is magnetized towards it; its traumatic force pulls us in. When we finally arrive, silence descends.

Steve McQueen’s Grenfell, filmed six months after the horrific and preventable fire that claimed seventy-two lives and injured more than seventy people in June 2017, proposes a spatial and temporal mode of looking at this site of violent disaster that contests deliberate processes of misrecognition and forgetting—and indeed, the injustice of a reality where such violence has not simply stopped time in its tracks. Following the film’s preliminary, steady approach across London’s skyline towards the tower, the remainder of its twenty-four minutes is spent silently orbiting it with a meticulous, multiplanar choreography. As we circle the tower, the camera at times draws closer to render details of its facade and interiors starkly visible; at other times it pulls away, reminding us of the sheer weight of a twenty-four-story residential building that was allowed, through structural neglect and avarice, to burn for sixty hours. These movements interact with latitudinal shifts in perspective that produce disorienting slants, illusory twists, and vanishing points with the building’s lines, its angles and shadows. In this refusal of stillness, finality cannot congeal: Grenfell is destroyed and vacant (save for workers in white PPE ostensibly undertaking forensic procedures to prepare the building for its end of life), but still it speaks, animated by our facilitated act of looking in motion.

As the perceptual effects of this movement act on us—our sighting capabilities primed by repetition, focus, and the deprivation of sound—what is initially sensed as looking “at” the tower also slides seamlessly into looking “as” the tower itself. The camera lines up with the cheek of the building’s visage, and in adopting its outward gaze, viewers are asked to contemplate the radius of its impact, including what it demands of us. What does Grenfell emit—what painful and enduring toxicities, chemical and psychic and social, leach into its surroundings? And what does its presence conspicuously jutting into the skyline ask of those who sense it, so that something like the Grenfell fire becomes, as it always should have been, absolutely unfathomable? (One of the most upsetting aspects of this footage is how London, as if it does not know any better, is radiant with beautiful, golden sunlight.) Six months after the fire, when Grenfell was filmed, the soil twenty-seven meters from the tower contained 130 mg/kg of the clastogenic and carcinogenic substance benzene, at least forty times greater than the guideline level for residential land.1 Much writing about the tower, and latterly the film, refers to Grenfell as a “carcass,” the technical term for the material frame of a building usually hidden from view, and here, stripped bare by fire. Nevertheless, to think of Grenfell as a “carcass” calls to mind first and foremost a corpse, the stench of death, the atmosphere of grief and decay thickening around a body that has been victim to grotesque violence.

To orbit something is to be drawn into its gravitational field—for its mass to exert so strong a force on us that we are pulled into cyclical movement around it. Grenfell configures the tower as this type of massive object: the axis around which our lives should revolve, a force we should be unable to deny. McQueen urgently set out to shoot the film in 2017 after realizing that Grenfell was due to be covered up by officials within months, sensing that once this happened, it “would only be a matter of time before it faded from the public’s memory.”2 First exhibited to the fire’s survivors, relatives, and the bereaved at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2023, the film has now embarked on a national tour of five cities in the UK which began this March and continues through to 2027. The timing of this interjection is particularly imperative, as the tower—currently shrouded in plastic, with a rooftop banner reading “Grenfell: Forever In Our Hearts”—is due for demolition later this year. The white plastic wrap, which both serves the practical purpose of shielding the surrounding area from falling debris and “sensitively and respectfully covers the building from view,”3 can be read as a containment exercise extending beyond the material: What if debris was allowed to fall? What if the building, in the aftermath of this horrific disaster, would have kept making itself known: scarred fragments thrown from its body, its upsetting appearance exerting on us the full strength of its anguish, refusing normalcy? The opaque whiteness of the wrap contains, too, the fact that the overwhelming majority of those killed in the fire—those rendered killable under the necropolitical machinery of racial capitalism—were working class, Black and Muslim, predominantly from the Middle East and North Africa, South Africa, West Africa, and South Asia. In asking us to look upon the tower’s scorched yet uncensored form, Grenfell does not so much transport its viewers back in time but remind us of what is still there—despite procedures that attempt, with varying degrees of intentionality, to gradually dismantle the tower’s meaning and presence in public consciousness.

In a text accompanying the film’s exhibition, Paul Gilroy writes of the arduous campaign to seek justice for Grenfell: “Time itself became a weapon favored by the powerful, who use it to generate fatigue and hopelessness among their opponents.” If McQueen felt as if it would only be a matter of time before these systemic processes of delay, convenient forgetting, and erasure were set in motion, his film arguably makes matter of time itself: the durational weight of Grenfell, the visceral emotion that compounds with every minute we spend looking at the tower in this way, obstructs the flow of time eroding its memory. Circling the building over and over again, viewers are asked to reject the teleology of “moving on” in favor of “moving towards/around”: grief becomes a vortex, orienting us around a curved experience of temporality in opposition to the linear capitalist flows of commuter traffic and advertising, a morbidly unfazed insistence on the everyday, visible in the periphery of the frame. Spatially and durationally, Grenfell appears to enact the Brazilian poet Leda Maria Martins’s notion of “spiral time,” which sidesteps a Western fixation on chronology and the horizon of the future to experience time as “movements of reversibility, dilation, non-linearity, [and] simultaneity of present, past, and future instances.”4 Heightening this sense of curved and elasticated temporality, of the present bending to meet the past, is the film’s employment of ambient noise and then silence: as we are ejected from the image-sound synchronicity that familiarly anchors us into a certain linear experience of reality, Grenfell’s gravitational force seems to pull us deeper into time, out of joint with the here and now. To move on is to accept the disposability of certain human lives as tolerable, as given. It is only by allowing ourselves to be drawn into orbit around this abyss of grief, by forever attempting to grasp this unforgivable theft of life, that we might locate the will and precision of purpose to refuse the conditions that made it possible.

McQueen’s camera was not the first to orbit Grenfell. In the latter stages of the fire, a drone was used by the London Fire Brigade to assist visibility amidst the real danger that the building was structurally unsound; it also enabled the detection of heat signatures from bodies that might have still been trapped inside.5 Grenfell’s intervention on the plane of visibility then also makes visible, via a ghostly palimpsest, that earlier camera: what carnage, terror, and chaos it must have recorded and transmitted, here burnt and encoded into the surface of the building’s remains. But this summoned tether between the two cameras also brings into view Grenfell’s discomfiting status as an art film exhibited in gallery spaces. Some may abhor this context for such painful and disturbing footage, the unavoidable air of spectacle this lends, despite the film’s immense respect for its subject matter and the care evident in its presentation.

Yet if the gallery presupposes a certain mode of engagement with the work, perhaps our greatest hope lies in the fact that it will be seen by people who have all, in some way, deliberately chosen to grapple with what it means to spend time in the building’s presence. In the bruised grey-black of Grenfell, the stacks of pink refuse bags presumably containing the incinerated detritus of people’s lives and homes, one can also see Gaza. And in the heaviness of twenty-four minutes spent singularly contemplating this one site of irredeemably cruel man-made disaster lies a reprisal against a mode of witnessing countless more sites of atrocity in fragments of seconds on small screens, scrolling past rubble. Unease about Grenfell as an artwork might be reframed through experiencing it as a specific process of aestheticization: which is not the obscene idea of beautifying something for consumption, but as Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman articulate, the act of rendering both the building and ourselves more attuned to sensing and sense-making, including our capacity to feel injustice—in other words, the opposite of anaesthetization.6 To sit with Grenfell—and to practice the kind of focus and attunement facilitated by a gallery space—is thus not just to become sensitized in this way to the tower alone, but to global and intricately linked chains of culpability and racialized, capitalist violence on a massive scale. Upon leaving the screening room, one is met with a wall bearing the names of the seventy-two people killed in the fire; the weight of it is crushing.

As emphasized by the exhibition text, the recommendations made following an official governmental inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire have yet to be implemented with apposite urgency. As of October 2023, thousands of residential buildings in the UK still had unsafe cladding in breach of fire safety regulations, with over a thousand categorized as having “life-critical fire safety risks.”7 Drawn-out, fatiguing legal and bureaucratic processes also mean that no trials for corporate manslaughter in relation to the Grenfell disaster are to be expected until 2027, when the film will end its national tour, a full decade after the fire.

The matter of time that Grenfell contests—from demolition, to deferral of justice, to the drowning out of tragedy by the relentless march of the everyday—is one of mnemonic and material eradication. In a video made by Forensic Architecture, audio snippets from the deposition of various actors in the chain of responsibility for the Grenfell fire reveal that memory, or more accurately the dubious lack of it, is weaponized to smother the truth, to keep it in the dark until time can do the rest. After a disquietingly uniform barrage of “I don’t remember” and “I don’t recall” in response to the most basic questions, the video closes with the words of former housing minister Eric Pickles, under whose tenure Grenfell’s renovation with flammable cladding was approved. “Can I respectfully remind you that you did promise that we would be away this morning, and I have changed my schedules to fit this in?” he says to the inquirer. He has a busy day full of meetings to get to. “I would urge you to use your time wisely.”8 As Grenfell ends, the sound of London gradually returns, releasing us back into the gushing stream of capitalist time: commutes, meetings, the luxury of being able to gain distance from the site and time of tragedy, if we so wish. It cannot hold us there forever, but how we respond to its call, its refusal to move onwards, is up to us.