Colonial residues and toxic aftermaths: Necropolitics and the matter of memory in Grenfell by Steve McQueen (2023)

This article examines Steve McQueen’s commemorative film Grenfell (2023) as confronting the necropolitics of the Grenfell Tower fire and its toxic aftermaths. Drawing on environmental memory studies, critical posthumanism and new materialism, the film is read as reorienting commemoration towards material conditions and toxic afterlives. In considering the longue durée of colonial governance, racial capitalism and institutional neglect, it examines how McQueen’s durational aerial footage resists interpretive closure and aesthetic sanitisation. This is read as making present the materially and politically embedded legacies of British imperialism. In attending to the commemorative vitality of matter, the article then locates Grenfell within an Anthropocenic memorial landscape.