What happens when your local high street becomes somewhere you no longer recognise or can afford to take part in? When the open spaces on your estates are seized to make way for expensive housing? When the people you grow up with experience life-altering exclusions, or are displaced from the borough entirely?
For
@erdem.kuslu , these arenât abstract questions. Theyâre part of what it has meant to grow up in Hackney, a borough he still describes, first and foremost, with affection.
âItâs beautiful,â he says, sitting by the caged football pitch. âItâs always been communal.â
Erdem recently presented a TikTok series documenting London Fields, speaking about Hackney with an ease that felt unfiltered. âMost of it was off the dome. If I care about something, I donât need a script.â
As a child, Hackney offered a strong sense of community, but also early glimpses of inequality. âYou see things happen to people,â he says. âAnd later, you understand why.â Things like school exclusions went on to derail the lives of people he grew up with.
Erdem is careful not to reduce Hackneyâs dramatic evolution to a single narrative. He recognises the investment, the energy, the sense of momentum.
But living through the change is a complicated feeling. There are subtle shifts in everyday life, like familiar shops changing hands and spaces that once felt easy becoming places you think twice about entering.
âItâs not always one big thing,â he explains. âItâs a build-up of small moments.â
It stems from who a space feels designed for, and how that shapes its atmosphere. âYou canât always point to something specific,â he says. âBut Iâve felt it before. The looks, the body language, the way youâre received compared to someone else.â
Over time, this can have a lasting effect, people can end up avoiding their local area altogether. Not because theyâve been explicitly excluded, but because the space feels like itâs courting a different clientele.
As an artist, he channels these tensions into his work, creating layered compositions that bring together fragments of culture, politics and personal experience. âPeople say itâs like looking into my brain,â he says. âThereâs a lot going on.â
