SOS:OK
— Emergency Biscuit
— Community memory / Food relief / Industrial heritage / Participatory design
SOS:OK — Emergency Biscuit explores vernacular memory and community infrastructures through a participatory artwork that revisits Bermondsey’s biscuit industry and reimagines food relief as artistic and social practice.
Bermondsey, London (UK) / 2004
Community collaboration / Industrial memory / Participatory design / Food politics / Social sculpture / Publishing as method
SOS:OK (Save Our Souls: Zero Killings) is a temporary public artwork developed with Coleman Project Space in Bermondsey, South London. The project revisits the industrial and social history of the Peek Frean biscuit factory — once one of the largest employers in the area — through a participatory process involving former factory workers.
For more than a century Bermondsey was affectionately known as “Biscuit Town”, a neighbourhood shaped by the labour, rhythms, and social life of the Peek Frean factory. When the factory closed in 1989, thousands of workers lost their jobs and the local industrial infrastructure gradually disappeared, replaced by speculative redevelopment and gated housing.
SOS:OK reactivated this history through a collaborative process in which former workers were invited to imagine and design a new biscuit representing their neighbourhood. The project translated industrial memory into a contemporary artistic form that combined exhibition, public action, and publishing.
Rather than commemorating the factory as heritage, the project approached it as a living social archive — one that could still generate forms of collective imagination and solidarity.
Project unfolding
The exhibition at Coleman Project Space was staged as a symbolic emergency food relief operation.
At the centre of the project was the Emergency Biscuit kit, consisting of a specially produced biscuit packaged alongside a publication titled Guide to Emergency Food Relief Operation. The guide reflected on experiences of food distribution during wartime and humanitarian crises, drawing connections between historical relief efforts and contemporary conditions of social vulnerability.
The biscuit itself was developed through workshops with former Peek Frean employees. Participants shared memories of factory work, neighbourhood life, and the role the factory once played in Bermondsey’s social fabric. These exchanges informed the symbolic design of a new biscuit representing the community.
The distribution of the biscuits extended beyond the gallery. Crates were transported through Bermondsey on horse and cart along Tower Bridge Road and the Blue market, echoing the visual language of humanitarian relief convoys.
Visitors to the exhibition received biscuits packaged like emergency rations, transforming the gallery into a temporary site of redistribution.
Research focus
The project explores:
• industrial memory and post-industrial transformation
• the social life of factories and neighbourhood labour histories
• food as cultural symbol and social infrastructure
• participatory design as artistic method
• artistic responses to urban displacement and redevelopment
SOS:OK asks how artistic practice might activate dormant industrial histories while responding to present social conditions. The project reflects on Bermondsey’s transformation from manufacturing centre to speculative real-estate landscape, where former workers increasingly faced unemployment, displacement, and the erosion of long-standing community networks.
Methodology: participation, memory, and symbolic redistribution
The work unfolds through three interconnected strands.
1. Collective memory and participatory design
Former factory workers were invited to share memories of life and labour at Peek Frean. These conversations formed the basis for collectively imagining a new biscuit — a symbolic object representing the neighbourhood’s industrial heritage.
2. Exhibition as relief operation
The gallery was staged as a site of emergency distribution. The Emergency Biscuit and accompanying guide reframed the exhibition as a performative relief campaign, drawing attention to the politics of food, labour, and social welfare.
3. Publishing as social device
The Guide to Emergency Food Relief Operation functioned both as documentation and as conceptual extension of the project. Through historical references, testimonies, and design elements, the publication linked Bermondsey’s local history to broader histories of food relief and humanitarian aid.
Publishing here operates as a tool of mediation — connecting collective memory, artistic practice, and public discourse.
Historical reference
The project also references a historical moment connected to the Peek Frean company. After the lifting of the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870, Peek Frean supplied thousands of biscuits to starving citizens.
By evoking this episode, SOS:OK draws a line between nineteenth-century industrial philanthropy and contemporary questions of social care and food insecurity.
The symbolic redistribution of biscuits in Bermondsey echoes this historical gesture while asking how communities might reimagine solidarity under conditions of economic transition.
From Practice to Manifesto
SOS:OK represents an early articulation of several methodologies that later became central within the msdm framework:
• participatory artistic research
• publishing as method
• artistic engagement with vernacular and industrial archives
• socially situated artistic production
The project anticipates msdm’s ongoing exploration of publishing as relational infrastructure, where exhibitions, publications, and collaborative processes function together as forms of collective knowledge production.
Rather than producing a fixed memorial to industrial labour, SOS:OK activated Bermondsey’s past as a site of dialogue, memory, and speculative imagination.
→ Read the msdm manifesto
Related research within msdm
The concerns explored in SOS:OK resonate with other long-term research platforms within msdm, particularly Found Photo Foundation.
Both projects engage with vernacular memory and community infrastructures — approaching everyday cultural artefacts (photographs, food, neighbourhood histories) as relational archives shaped by circulation, loss, labour, and collective experience.
Where Found Photo Foundation works with orphan photographs as displaced image archives, SOS:OK activates industrial memory and food culture as forms of vernacular social knowledge embedded within place.
Together these projects contribute to msdm’s broader investigation into participatory research, community archives, and publishing as method.
→ Explore Found Photo Foundation
Forms / Outputs (selected)
Publications & editorial projects
SOS:OK
Guide to Emergency Food Relief Operation
40 pages, duotone, 12 × 18 cm
Edition: 1000
Graphic design: Ajdin Basic & Paula Roush
Typeface: Gyro (Domen Fras)
Texts: Zeigam Azizov, Alice Park, paula roush
First edition produced for SOS:OK
Coleman Project Space, London, 2004
Second edition produced for Public Services
Pavel Haus (Laafeld, Austria) / Sparwasser HQ (Berlin)
Curated by Tadej Pogačar
Exhibitions / Public action
– SOS:OK (Save Our Souls: Zero Killings)
Coleman Project Space, London
Curated by Frances Coleman
Emergency Biscuit distribution through Bermondsey
Tower Bridge Road / The Blue market
– Public Services — Pavel Haus (Laafeld, Austria)
/ Sparwasser HQ (Berlin)
Workshops & Participatory Labs (Selected)
– Memory Factory — Coleman Project Space, London
SOS:OK
(SAVE OUR SOULS: ZERO KILLINGS)
Curated by Frances Coleman
Coleman Project Space London
SOS:OK
Guide to Emergency Food Relief Operation
40 pages, duotone, 12 × 18 cm
Edition: 1000
Graphic design: Ajdin Basic & Paula Roush
Typeface: Gyro (Domen Fras)
Texts: Zeigam Azizov, Alice Park, paula roush
First edition produced for SOS:OK
Coleman Project Space, London, 2004
Second edition produced for Public Services
Pavel Haus (Laafeld, Austria) / Sparwasser HQ (Berlin)
Curated by Tadej Pogačar
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SOS;OK EMERGENCY BISCUIT
at the – Public Services exhibition
Curated by Tadej Pogacar
With: Marjetica Potrc, paula roush, Apolonija Sustersic, Anja Planiscek and Tadej Pogacar, Temporary Services
— Pavel Haus (Laafeld, Austria)
/ Sparwasser HQ (Berlin)afeld, Austria and Sparwasser HQ, Berlinbition