On two occasions I’ve seen a body dead, or nearly so, and left uncovered on the street. The first was in D.C. near a petrol station in Shaw, home to a mix of middle class Washingtonians. Two or three times I heard from my apartment what my housemate authoritatively told me were gunshots. The scene – a small but noticeable pool of blood beneath a body splayed and still – made things clear. A crowd, gathered before I’d arrived, stood watch; I slowed my pace but did not approach.
The second, which I saw in London near Borough, was that of a man who a car had flung several meters into a bollard where he lay awkward and motionless. I gauged the distance from the gap between the body and a bicycle – the car, frozen in space at the site of collision, had crushed the bike wheel into a right angle. Between the corpse, car and bike, a melange of parts, and blood. I got off my own bicycle, walked the rest of the way to my appointment and arrived late.
For weeks after the fire, which raged for 60 hours and claimed 72 lives, Grenfell tower in London’s North Kensington was left uncovered. Passersby couldn’t help but pause and crane their necks upward. The urge to do so was irresistible. The tarp which covers the building today, adorned with the green heart which has become the official symbol of the disaster and the words ‘forever in our hearts’, has made bearable the burnt-out husk which overlooks schools and playgrounds – and is visible from the passing train line.
Steve McQueen begins Grenfell, his new film on show at Serpentine Gallery in London, shot six months after the fire, by approaching the block on a helicopter via London’s low-rise suburbs. Rows and rows of disorganized mock-Tudor houses morph slowly into Victorian terraces, then the city’s western skyline, then Grenfell.
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