Arcade East
Every summer, the space will be activated to present a themed season of events and installations, showcasing pioneering work in the fields of design, making and ideation. As well as working with students, staff and researchers to present and experiment with ideas, we will be partnering with local stakeholders and partners to create an exciting range of community-facing initiatives including screenings, workshops, pop-up kitchens and activities.
Arcade East is part of the new public facing LCF Arts Programme.
The programme is free of charge and is supported by events, screenings, workshops and performances.
Contact us
arcadeeast@arts.ac.uk
Creative Lab 2021
6 - 11 September 2021
East London Dance and London College of Fashion, UAL are delighted to offer students and emerging practitioners the opportunity to take part in the Creative Lab 2021.
For the fourth year, Creative Lab brings together a select group of costume designers, choreographers and creative technologists to investigate how physical computing, mixed and virtual reality and e-textiles can inform practice when combined with dance and choreography.
Visit the East London Dance website for more information about Creative Lab 2021.

Projects

Design and Politics season 2019
Over the summer of 2019, Arcade East’s free programme of events, performances and debates focused on Design and Politics.
The programme looked at the precarious nature of our current political climate, investigated from both global and local angles. A select group of artists, collectives and communities including ME & EU, Foreign Investment, Hervisions, MARICUMBIA, Failed States, Iggy LDN, Anastasiia Fedorova, Womxn SRSLY, Stance and Huckfield & Hutchinson took over the space and presented their responses to the theme through a range of activities and interventions.
The takeovers explored topics such as migration, climate and refuge, club culture and marginalisation, knife crime and masculinities as well as body politics and cultural hybridity.

Arcade East Sustainability and Innovation Season 2018
Arcade East, London College of Fashion’s new project space, was developed to host a themed season of events and installations with a focus on digital practice and innovation each summer as part of a new LCF Arts Programme. Most projects are developed in conjunction with a new interdisciplinary space, the Digital Learning Lab, which operates at the intersection between traditional and digital practice for design, making and ideation.
This summer’s programme focused on Sustainability and Innovation. Ranging from A Toolkit for the Future, a day of speculative design workshops in collaboration with the V&A’s The Future Starts Here exhibition programme, to a series of events during the London Design Festival in September including Open Sesame, an installation by 2017 Fashion Space Gallery Design resident Charlotte Maeva Perret.
East Wall at The Tower of London
East Wall 2018
in partnership with East London Dance, Hofesh Shechter, Historic Royal Palaces and LIFT
150 performers stormed the Tower of London in a spectacular collision of music and dance in 2018. Bringing together dance styles from across London and fuelled by rousing music from The Band of the Irish Guards, contemporary a cappella vocal group The Gold Vocal Collective, rock musicians, strings and vocalists and the rebellious history of the site itself, East Wall was the Tower’s first large-scale artistic presentation since the award-winning Poppies installation.
Directed by the internationally-celebrated artist and choreographer Hofesh Shechter, East Wall invited you to discover dynamic new dance created by Becky Namgauds, Duwane Taylor, James Finnemore and Joseph Toonga, four of London’s most exciting young choreographers.
From grime to gospel, krump to contemporary, this epic production indulged senses in a tapestry of music and dance that celebrates East London’s diversity and puts its rich cultural heritage centre stage.

A Toolkit for the Future
A Toolkit for the Future at the V&A asked thinkers and makers to question dominant futures and imagine alternative worlds, sharing perspectives on technology, politics, and speculative design. Speakers include: An Xiao Mina, Matt Jones, Jonas Staal, Kei Kreutler, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Bethan Wolfenden, Anab Jain and Luiza Prado.
The event continued with a day of speculative design workshops in partnership with the London College of Fashion’s Arts Programme at their East London project space Arcade East. This day also acted as the starting point for a summer season of exploratory workshops and speculative installations and discussions by artists, designers and students around the theme of Sustainability and Innovation at Arcade East.
Fashion Futures 2030 - A story from Hyper Hype by Crackstevens
Fashion Now and Fashion Futures 2030
part of V&A's Fashioned From Nature
Fashioned from Nature explores the relationship between fashion and nature from 17th to 21st century. Commissioned by the exhibition’s curator, Edwina Ehrman, Centre for Sustainable Fashion’s Professor Dilys Williams has conceived two installations for the exhibition, Fashion Now and Fashion Futures 2030. Along with fellow CSF team member, Renee Cuoco, Director of LCF’s Fashion Space Gallery Ligaya Salazar and MA Fashion Futures students as well as four film makers, Crack Stevens, Nadira Amrani, Carlos Jiménez and Cieron Magat, the installations have been realised for public exhibition at the V&A from April 2018 until February 2019, before touring to other international locations.
Fashion Now
Every element of fashion comes from nature. Each day, we express our relationship with the natural world through what we choose to make or buy and wear. But how much do we actually know about what we are saying through the clothes that we wear? Examining five contemporary fashion items, this display follows how we relate to nature across a five-stage fashion lifecycle: design, make, acquire, wear/care, discard.
Referencing eight elements of nature relating to fashion’s lifecycle, the installations, based on familiar fashion dialogues, such as Instagram, purchase receipts, illustration and video, show that fashion’s interaction with these elements frequently reveals an unequal partnership. They go on to suggest questions we can ask ourselves and others, to help us develop a healthier relationship with nature in our fashion choices.
Fashion Futures 2030
Although we cannot accurately predict the future, we can shape it through our values and actions. It is urgent that we change our current fashion habits in order to keep within a safe operating space on earth.
Fashion Futures 2030 explores what fashion and nature might look like within four world scenarios. The scenarios are based on environmental, economic, social, cultural and technological changes taking place across the globe. They are not predictions, but stories of how the future might unfold, developed through research and with contribution from Forum for the Future. Stories from these scenarios have been developed into four short films depicting elements of how we might live, dress and value nature. Visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to share how they would like fashion to be designed, made, acquired, cared for and disposed of (or not) in 2030 through an interactive set of questions. Data from the exhibition over the forthcoming year will be gathered by the research team and analysed into a final account of the scenarios, revealing the choices made by visitors to the exhibition.
Wearable Resistance
part of City Now/City Future at the Museum of London
Radical political decisions and technological advances have been affecting people around the globe on a massive scale over the past decade. Security, both national and individual, is often deployed as a key argument to justify the use of evermore dense control systems, promising to protect citizens from crime. Frequently, these systems target the citizens themselves by tracking and analysing their actions for future reference, incentivising good behaviour. Knowing when one’s privacy is infringed is becoming more difficult as the lines blur between private companies, banks, health care providers, global players, the police and governments all having an interest in our data. This is particularly pertinent in the case of London, where there is approximately one CCTV camera for every 13 people, making it the most surveilled city in the world.
In light of this climate, we see a number of creative practitioners that use garments to highlight the problematic nature of these tendencies. Deeply politically and socially minded, their projects, collections and artefacts are responding to technology mixed with executive power, to marginalisation and decreased citizens rights. Their aim is to educate as much as to provoke.
Wearable Resistance put clothes into this critical context: as the interface between the individual’s safety and third party interest allowing for a different perspective on how we usually see fashion enacted.
