This project produces a fixed, material collage that stages the co-presence of Woolwich’s military past and contemporary redevelopment through montage and surface. The hollow silhouette motif from Peter Burke’s Assembly functions as a threshold figure and scale marker, bringing archival barracks imagery and today’s residential/commercial surfaces of the Royal Arsenal into the same visual field. Rather than treating representation as neutral, the work makes mediation visible through selection, cutting, layering, and material interruption, holding friction between erasure and adaptation without resolving it into a single storyline.

The project refuses both a single storyline related to the area's military past and the glossy regeneration image by refusing to grant any one image authority. It also refuses the fiction of neutrality in maps, archives and marketing visuals by foregrounding the labour of composition: what is selected, centred , softened, and overwritten. History is addressed as an ongoing politics of framing and replacement, not a stable object to be illustrated.