Refusing to Look Away from Violence
Olivia Laing, frieze
August 2018
At a party in south London, a man comes up to me. He’s big, with close-cropped grey hair, bright blue eyes, a network of broken veins across his face. ‘My dad was Irish,’ he says, ‘he worked on the building sites. London was built by the Irish. They all died young. No compensation. It was the asbestos, it got into their lungs.’ He tells me about working on a demolition site as a teenager, bringing tea to a man who emerged from a tunnel the width of his body, which ran 40 metres beneath the ground. He had a handkerchief over his mouth. Pulled it off, grinning, his whole face pancaked in poisonous white dust. […]