Patrick Herold

The Park within the Park by the Agency of the (After-)Spectacle

The Olympic Games are over. The legacy now is constructing the new image of the Queen Elizabeth Park as the new public realm for East London, referencing the Olympic Spirit. The move to redevelop a large area of the city based on the positive spirit of the Olympics and its imposed narrative needs to be critically questioned. This Redevelopment which will be divided from the neighbourhood, producing a homogeneous island of security,

The Agency, set up as a reaction to this corporate commodification of the Olympics and its spectacle, proposes the (After-) SPECTACLE in form of a park within a park - an informal narrative within the formal narrative of the legacy.

This (After)-Spectacle describes the process by which the organically developed narratives - be it individual or collective - are brought back to the site and the park within the park, and its different components create the infrastructure that hold the old narratives whilst enabling new informal narratives to be created and captured in a permanent archive tower.

The park within the park is a fragmented infrastructure which sets up an alternative public realm within the Olympic Park. This oppositional realm, a counter narrative along the River Lea, uses the past and currently displaced narratives to produce the (After-)SPECTACLE and questions how interventions can be used critically to correspond between the erased historical context and the new development and histories it will create.