My mother first tried to run away from home when she was eight. She and her elder brother Lenny had had enough of working in their dad’s shop, so they decided to call it quits.

As Lenny scrambled onto the roof of their Dalston home, my eight year old mother realised a major flaw in their plan: siblings. Her younger sister Helen wouldn’t be able to keep up and Lisa was just a baby. There was no way she could hold two children and a bag of nappies. Still, she couldn’t leave them behind.

She would have to stay and watch her brother escape.

As it transpired Lenny couldn’t get past the chimney and was stuck. It was up to his abandoned troop to go downstairs and surrender themselves; awaiting their punishment with hanging heads of defeat.

My mother never told me that when she tried to run away ten years later, she succeeded. She’d always said that she left home at 18, and I never thought to question it. I knew that she would have left behind a world of responsibility: working in the family shop, looking after her seven brothers and sisters, cooking and cleaning every day as well as keeping on top of her school work. I didn’t know she’d disappeared to find her freedom – I thought she’d been able to leave of her own free will.

It turns out she’d been faced with two options: become a lawyer or have an arranged marriage. She didn’t much like the sound of either and decided to click her heels. My mother tells me this with a grin on her face and a quiet chuckle, but I think she still feels pretty dreadful about it. Packing up your room and leaving nothing but a note saying “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be in touch,” sounds like something out of a film, where the kid comes home after a couple of days. My mother didn’t go back for six weeks. She was careful to visit the shop and not the house, and wouldn’t tell anyone where she was living.

She had good reason. A couple of years before, two of her older cousins Grinny and Nitsu had had the same idea, but they had run off with their boyfriends. The shame that such an act brought to a Greek Orthodox family enraged their father. He hunted them down and had their boyfriends hospitalised. Grinny and Nitsu had to be examined by a doctor and stitched up before being married off: “To make them virgins again,” my mother explains as I sit with my mouth gaping.

My mother, Mary Eleftheriou the young adult, the survivor, lived for 18 months with her family in Palmers Green and herself in an undisclosed location until she had no choice but to go home: her mother was ill. There were migraines, and then fits. Her mother had been given a brain scan but the doctors hadn’t been able to find anything wrong. Two months later they found a large tumor.

I never hear stories about my grandmother, if she is mentioned it’s with a great fondness: a soft voice and a faint smile on my mother’s face. From what I can tell she didn’t have the easiest of lives, she came to England from Cyprus to find work and was married to my grandfather by 17. It was an arranged marriage. She had eight children, but her daughter Helen died at the age of twelve from choking on a pen lid and she was left with seven. The few black and white pictures we have dotted around the house show me that she was very pretty, and I can see a striking resemblance between her and my aunt Lisa. They have the same height and build, and the same eyes.

The tumour was on a part of the brain that would have affected my grandmother’s speech, had it been operated on. This doesn’t appear to have been an option as it was growing very fast. It was also the ’70s, and “in those days doctors didn’t really tell you much,” my mother says. I think that my grandfather didn’t tell his children the extent of his wife’s illness and didn’t have the money to act on it either. There was probably a slight language barrier and nobody thought to talk to Lenny or my mother. I don’t know what really went on, this is the first time my mother has told me details of my grandmother’s illness, and it’s in broken speech, with long pauses.

I know she had to take a lot of medication, and that it made her very sleepy. My mother was looking after my grandmother the day she went into a coma, though she had no idea what had happened. “Mum’s been asleep all day,” she told her dad when he got home from the shop. He knew exactly what was going on and called an ambulance. My grandmother died in hospital a few days later.

My mother stayed at home for a while, to look after her dad and her brothers and sisters. They all dealt with it in different ways: apparently my grandfather wasn’t home very often and my youngest uncle Chris got appendicitis. My mother stayed as long as she could and then moved in with her boyfriend, Roger, before starting at Kingston Polytechnic. She didn’t run off or leave a note, she made sure they all knew exactly where she was going.

In the valley was a frozen pond, so we recreated Swan Lake. Very, very gracefully of course:

Swan Lake part one: The Awakening

Swan Lake part two: The Dance

Sometimes it’s very fun to be filmed while making an absolute tit of yourself.

There are records and magazines in glass cabinets next to clothed mannequins, badges and more paraphenalia.  The best bit however, is the wall dedicated to self portraits of the photographers responsible for taking the iconic images of the sixties. They’re only small prints of people looking serious or silly, but they’re super cool.

These are the postcards I picked up:

And write funny things inside them:

Thanks Eli.

SHOWFLAT makes the artist’s home the exhibition space. They provide the funding, host the party and bring the crowds. And they’re good at it. Since May 2008 their following has grown, so that each new show sees a range of new faces, not only the friends invited on facebook. There’s always an opening party with booze and biscuits, and the show stays up for a week after, which can be visited by appointment. They’re not anti-gallery, they’re just pro-viewing.

Mario Borza founded the organisation (and is also one of the artists), while Nathaniel Clark is the curator and party host. Since May of last year he’s been invading artists homes and transforming them into galleries. Now the latest show will see this concept flipped on its head. “The Annuale: The chickens have come home to roost” is a SHOWFLAT showcase, in which Nathaniel’s five-floor Georgian house in Mile End becomes the gallery. It’s going to be overrun with nine different artist’s works, installations, performances and paintings. So how does he feel about it? “I feel like you get what you deserve,” he says half-laughing. “There’s a kind of equality created by having them all exhibit in my house. I now have to expose my day to day business in they same way that they have exposed theirs.”

The idea of the public versus the private space: the open-door home-based gallery will be embodied by Nathaniel’s desk. Covered in plans, papers and paraphernalia of the previous artists’ individual exhibitions – in the midst of their own invasion – is the reminder that the outside world has come to the curator. This will sit within the nine artists’ offerings. Hannah Hull starts the show with a huge stripe of yellow around the front fence, while Mario Borza’s inflatable water fountain sits in the front garden. Inside the house is Toby Clarkson’s sound and video installations within the chimney and sofa, alongside Jon Sack’s illustrations. The adjoining room of the ground floor sees Laura Wilson project a view from the skylight of her Southwark flat over 24 hours, onto Clark’s ceiling. Downstairs in the kitchen, Charlotte Jarvis is hosting the ‘Convention of the Shy Naturist Dinner Party’. Members of the public may only participate if naked, and everyone at the table must wear a brown paper bag over their head. Borza’s second fountain is in the back garden while Marlene Haring occupies the shed with a secret performance. Every participant in her fifteen-minute show must sign a contract which silences them from speaking about what happens in the shed. Gail Burton’s delicate drawings on pieces of rizla are transformed into a banner and Oliver MacDonald adds his mix of toys and junk to the house. The art works develop on the stairs and lead viewers into bathrooms and bedrooms until they reach the top floor. As always, the exhibition is kicked off by a party, which promises to be wild. It’s a free for all to experience and interact with the work, and with each other.

“I think the party aspect is the most important thing about it,” says Nathaniel. “I hate being told to be quiet in museums. I wish they would just have a party in the Tate everyday. That way people would actually engage with what’s going on.” What Nathaniel doesn’t realise is how much he makes people who don’t know each other, talk to each other. At Oliver MacDonald’s opening party last month people couldn’t stop discussing his children’s toy cement mixers, because they physically overflowed with mayonnaise straight onto toy trucks that sat spilling with chips. Charlotte Jarvis’s staged memorial service in April actively involved the evening’s attendees by having her audience sit in rows of white plastic garden chairs inside her flat. They stood and sang together before later sharing their views about the performance they were part of. And the pokiness of Gail Burton’s Shoreditch flat meant people squeezed between shoulders and elbows to see her delicate sketches on pieces of Rizla dotted around the walls. Part of Nathaniel’s job as host at all of these parties is making sure that everyone had a glass of wine, and knows the name of the person standing next to them.

The opening party also means that viewers can question the artist about their work. Hosting an exhibition in a domestic situation creates a sense of familiarity that encourages discussion: “Everyone has pictures on the walls of their house – this makes people take what’s on the walls a little more seriously,” says Nathaniel. He explains that the networking aspect of the party is equally as important as everyone getting boozy and enjoying themselves. He says: “People come along because they know that there is going to be something interesting going on, and there is always the opportunity to get more involved.”

So if you miss this exhibition, there will always be another to join in with. The whole thing is an open-door party. SHOWFLAT is not a closed club.  

“The Annuale: The chickens have come home to roost” opens on Friday 24^th July and continues for a week. 

www.showflat.org

John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins is not a name that is instantly remembered. Yet his images are. The black and white scenes of 1960s life in London mix pop culture with underground movements. His pictures of liberation are constrasted against filth and poverty: dole queues, The Beatles, freedom protests, The Rolling Stones. Lonely streets and lively clubs depict the turbulence of the era and Hoppy’s role in it.

Against Tyranny: Talking about a revolutionary spans a period of intense activism, which sees Hoppy’s passion and photography flourish. Starting out as a reactor scientist at the Harwel Atomic Research labs, Hoppy dropped everything to go and protest against the atomic bomb, in Moscow, before being deported. The ensuing decade saw him co-found the UFO club, the International Times, and document the seedier side of London, as well as its pop idols as a photojournalist for Melody Maker and Peace News.

His images of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Marianne Faithful are warm and inclusive, whether taken in a studio, backstage at a gig, or caught in a throng of screaming fans. The artists are young and the photos are filled with movement and energy, a direct contrast to his jazz pictures of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. Hoppy catches a different energy with these faces, and a different kind of warmth: one of slow burning, constant progression and change from within the older generation of revolutionaries.

But the gem of the exhibition, in between naked images of Alan Ginsburg and anecdotes of his visiting Hoppy in prison, is a range of photos hidden from the public for forty years. Commissioned for a book that was never finished on the weird side of London, the subject is the unorthodox act where you least expect it. Behind closed doors Hoppy finds bondage, prostitutes, transvestites and tattoo artists.

This is what the G20 riots were like for me. I’m sure it would have been a different story if we’d been allowed to join the protests.

Rise was Europe’s largest anti-racism festival. Since 2001 it has been supported publicly and financially by the Mayor of London, the trade unions Unite and Unison, and by the National Assembly Against Racism (NAAR). Last year 100,000 people from all over London – notably families and young people – turned up to support the message of previous years: ‘London united against racism’. It’s a simple line, but a strong one.

It is the young people who will react to the cancellation of Rise, the people that Boris should be trying to please the most. We are the generation who have been taught in school to appreciate others’ religions, heritages and skin colours. We are the generation who hate racism but can still see its presence in the capital. And, as we are constantly reminded, we have a vote – and therefore a voice – which matters. Boris, take note.

While announcing last year that the slogan was to be changed to ‘Celebrating Diversity’, our Mayor did not realise how effective a few words could be. The trade unions and NAAR decided to pull funding from an event that did not directly promote anti-racism. This should have kick-started Boris “piccaninnies” Johnson, but he pulled the festival altogether reasoning that: “Without a major sponsor in place it is not considered appropriate to spend such a large amount on a single event, particularly during a recession.”

Boris is instead planning launch a two-day festival called Rhythm of London. Its intent is to give youngsters the chance to “have a go” and gain “access to music education, instrument tuition and venues”. The first day of the July festival will see schools hand-picked by City Hall having the chance to learn music performance and education. A nice idea, but a bland one. Music education is an important part of children’s education, but surely the curriculum has music classes firmly stamped into its timetable already?

The second day witnesses live performance across the capital, including the project ‘Street Piano’, where pianos are placed at public landmarks for people to “have a go” on. But Mr Johnson’s motivation is a little more transparent than he would like to appear – he has also commissioned live music from local musicians to play in bandstands. Coincidentally, the bandstands are in areas that supported Boris in the election: Barnet, Hillingdon and Redbridge, among others.

The problem is not that the Mayor has replaced one musical event with another; it is that he has replaced the overarching message. Rhythm of London promotes musical education – well done. But Rise promoted anti-racism, addressing an issue that needs focus and attention now that the BNP has won its first place in the London Assembly.

Rise festival was not perfect and last July it had its’ technical glitches – the power on the main stage was cut bang on 20:30 when Jimmy Cliff was practically mid-song. But it didn’t matter. The festival worked because music is something that can be communally enjoyed despite the racial or cultural make-up of the audience. It created pride in the community and pride in the city.

The atmosphere of the whole day was that of celebration, inclusion and fun. It was community created through the belief that racism is wrong. Boris, do not shelve this belief, it is important that Londoners hear it coming from you, too.