On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

“It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.”

Fredric Jameson’s The Seeds of Time (1996)

It is with this sentence that opens Patrick Keiller’s latest offering, Robinson in Space, at once an eminantly political essay on landscape and history, a rigorously experimental filmic object, and part three of a fictional trilogy involving a mysteriously elusive and half-deluded scholarly type named Robinson who undisguisably acts as Keiller’s own projection and fantasy.

The film purports to be assembled from reels abandoned in a caravan left behind by this evasise and shifty character, and is self-described as ‘picturesque views on journeys to sites of scientific and historical interest’. Its narrative backbone consists in the retelling of the unfolding events of the global economic meltdown of 2008, whilst Robinson’s obsession with port statistics has been replaced by agricultural observations and Paul Scofield’s voice-over, which seemed to embody the character in his absence, has given way to Vanessa Redgrave’s slighlty more distant, but no less monotonic and laconic tone.

Made possible through an AHRC-funded project, ‘The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image’, which explores narratives of mobility and the political in landscape and place and received the input of many academics including Doreen Massey, professor of Cultural Geography at the Open University, the film unveils the history and political forces at work in the seemingly peaceful and uneventful rolling hills of rural Oxforshire, quintessance of the English landscape; It challenges notions of the picturesque, confront visions of a rustic past with industrial romanticism and issues of land ownership, and is ultimately a reminder of the socially constructed notion of landscape.

Robinson’s camera stares ininterruptedly at these places, hoping to discern the “molecular basis of historical events”, framing the only visible remain of a decommissioned US airbase: a fire hydrant sticking out in the middle of a field near Greenham Common (the location of Dr David Kelly’s suicide), or highlighting the ruins of the abandoned villages around Hampton Gay, where 16th-century rebellion against the countryside’s enclosure began. Robinson ultimately discovers a vast network of government oil pipelines running unnoticed through southern England, connecting military sites.

True to Keiller’s own brand of meticulously prepared near-static images, the film alternates wide shots and macro, and sometimes reveals the imperceptible, for example in the red paint of a post-box being slowly eroded by use, or a colony of lichens growing at the corner of letterings on the surface of a roadsign.
The camera lingers for long moments, capturing seemingly mundane images of a noisy machine harvesting a field, or swaying foxgloves merely accompanied by birdsong, followed by the precise but silent beauty of a spider delicately spining its web – contrasted with the narrator’s detailed account of the near-collapse of the international banking system – hinting at the dual challenges posed by an economic and ecological crisis. These long shots effectively result in drawing the spectator towards meditative rhythms of thought oppositional to the politically brutal mechanisms outlined in the commentary, bringing intensity and focus and confering a hightened meaning to images of an otherwise mundane materialism, uncomfortably confronting daily reality with remote global events that seem outside any control, asking what efforts of the mind may be required to break free from the hold of market economy with the state of nature.

The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image blog: http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com/

A couple of days ago my good friend Roberto invited me to take part in an ‘experiment’, in fact it was a sketch for a live art piece he will be presenting at the Rifrazioni Festival of Contemporary Art (Lazio, Italy), in which he and I will be participating in late July.

It was a hot summer night in Clapton. I was sat on a bench in Millfields Park, eyes closed, waiting for the moment to arrive. A presence behind me, someone walking in the grass. A blindfold on my eyes. Roberto sat next to me, opened my hands and took my keys. From now on, I could only follow him – I felt somewhat submitted, I had to listen. He was the only guide. The story he was recounting was shifting time and place: it was now winter and I was in Brooklyn.

Eyesight disabled, the first steps in the grass were a little intimidating. Because of this sensory deprivation, my way of perceiving the world had to be reconsidered, and the world itself was changed into a place full of challenges: my feet became sensors of the ground, every bump a potential hurdle, every kerb a threshold, every wall an insurmontable frontier. Despite being relatively familiar with the area we traversed, I was completely unable to tell where I was going.

Sound was the other point of reference I could rely upon, but again it was hugely transformed by the effect of the blindfold: Ambient sounds took a whole new significance; they became abstracted, almost as if they were part of a setup, akin to a film soundtrack. Street chatter and conversations strangely felt like they were ‘acted out’ by people.

This unique experience, reminiscent of a soundwalk like Subtlemob, if only better, placed me at the center of an invisible stage, where everything and everyone around me took up a new role, forcing me to focus both on my senses – to make sense of my surroundings, and on my imagination – to visually interpret the story I was listening to.

The Rifrazioni festival takes place on the 29th, 30th of July and 1st of August in Anzio e Nettuno (Italy).

http://www.rifrazioni.org

Mythogeography takes the form of a documentary-fictional collection of the internal documents, diary fragments, letters, emails, narratives, notebooks and handbooks of a loose coalition of artists, performers, ‘alternative’ walkers and pedestrian geographers. All Illustrated in full colour by Tony Weaver, who designed the Wrights & Sites’ Mis-Guide books.

The fragmentary and slippery format recognises the disparate, loosely interwoven and rapidly evolving uses of walking today: as performance, as exploration, as urban resistance, as activism, as an ambulatory practice of geography, as meditation, as post-tourism, as dissident mapping, as subversion of and rejoicing in the everyday. ‘Mythogeography’ celebrates that interweaving, its contradictions and complementarities, and is an attempt at a handbook for those who want to be part of it.

Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways by Phil Smith is out on 26th January 2010.
Paperback (244 x 170mm), 256 pages. ISBN: 978-0-9562631-3-1

Mythogeography: The Book at Triarchy Press

http://www.mythogeography.com

L’acte de marcher est à l’espace ce que l’énonciation est à la langue: par cette affirmation, de Certeau a attribué à la marche une triple fonction « énonciative » :

• un procès d’appropriation du système topographique par le piéton,
• une réalisation spatiale du lieu, de même que parler est une réalisation sonore de la langue,
• et l’implication de relations entres positions différenciées, des contrats, de même que l’énonciation verbale est « allocution » et « implante l’autre en face ».

« La marche dessine un espace d’énonciation ; elle affirme, suspecte, hasarde, transgresse les trajectoires qu’elle « parle », par les types de relation qu’elle entretient avec les parcours en leur affectant une valeur de vérité, de connaissance ou de devoir-faire. Toutes les modalités y jouent, changeantes de pas en pas, et réparties dans des proportions, en des successions et avec des intensités qui varient selon les moments, les parcours, les marcheurs. » ¹

Alors que pour Bailly, la marche semble être un acte qui mêle le matériel au mental:

« Marcher dans la ville, c’est aller avec sa pensée à l’intérieur d’un réseau qui a lui-même la complexité et la vie d’une pensée : […] ou tout […] est traversé par une mémoire flottante dont nous ne faisons que pressentir les lois. »

Jean-Christophe Bailly, La Clairière, p.76

Ce qui « fait marcher »

« Marcher, c’est manquer de lieu. » Car le sens de la marche suit souvent le sens des mots, dans un jeu sur et avec les noms « propres ».

« La marche obéit à des tropismes sémantiques : elle est attirée ou repoussée par des nominations aux sens obscurs, des vocations ou appels qui tournent ou détournent l’itinéraire en lui donnant des sens (ou directions) jusque-là imprévisibles. Les noms propres y creusent des réserves de signification cachées et familières. Ce sont des mots qui perdent peu a peu leur valeur gravée, s’offrant aux polysémies dont les affectent les passants. Ils se détachent des endroits qu’ils étaient censés définir et servent de rendez-vous imaginaires à des voyages. étrange toponymie, décollée des lieux, planant au-dessus de la ville comme une géographie nuageuse de sens en attente. Ces mots opèrent au titre même d’un évidement et d’une usure de leur affectation première. Ils en deviennent des espaces libérés, occupables. » ²

¹ Michel de Certeau, Récits d’espace, in L’invention du quotidien, Tome 1 : arts de faire, Gallimard, 1990, p.171.

² ibid. p. 155

Sur la démarche créatrice du marcheur, voir Thierry Davila: Marcher, Créer. Déplacements, flâneries, dérives dans l’art de la fin du XXe siecle, Editions du Regard, 2002. Résumé à venir dans une note prochaine.

Finisterre is a collaborative film project, part-documentary / part-music promo, between film-makers Paul Kelly, Kieran Evans and the electro-pop band Saint-Etienne, produced by CC-Lab and supported by Onedotzero.

I watched this film for the first time shortly after it came out in 2003, and remained fascinated by it ever since; after watching it again recently I was inhabited by the same irresistible feelings of nostalgia and tenderness. Beyond the innovative format of the film, which seeks to explore the possibilities of a 60-minute music-promo at the scale of an entire album, the combination of Saint-Etienne’s melancholic or energetic tunes and Kelly/Evans thoughtful shots successfully captures the alternating moods that London has to offer to the unsuspecting visitor.

The film starts and finishes with a train journey in and out of the city, dusk to dawn, unknown to familiar, and transports the spectator on a journey of discoveries and insights into the ‘London Nobody Knows’, through a succession of interviews of local artists and residents connected to the story of Saint Etienne, blended with powerful musical passages accompanied by imagery ranging from architectural patterns to urban scenes and walking crowds, always meticulously shot as stills documenting the city area by area, punctuated by an overwhelming voice-over narrative that features the observations and reminiscences of Lawrence. Finisterre sheds some light on London as a source of influence, inspiration and curiosity for many, offering a trip through the city that is largely reminiscent of a line of psycho-geographic films such as ‘London’, ‘Robinson In Space’ (Patrick Keiller), and ‘Orbital’ (Chris Petit).

The result is a touching tribute to London, marvelously conveying the essence of the place while forming a visual record and musical impression of the city today.

BRENTFORD BIOPSY
April 5 – June 15

During April and May 2008, Watermans gallery will be converted into a live design/mapping studio where investigatory, locative media artist Christian Nold together with the designer Daniela Boraschi will be working with local residents to gather information for digital and physical visualizations of the ecological, cultural and economic ‘health’ of Brentford.

Instead of taking tissue samples as one would from a human being Christian Nold and participants will be using a range of cultural probes to investigate the local social body and its unique ailments. Like eastern medicine investigators will be taking a holistic view of
Brentford that looks for interconnections between problems and challenges to get a sense of the whole. The project acts as both creative art project as well as hard-nosed consultation with invited stakeholder groups like politicians, historians, the local chamber of commerce as well as ecologists and the general public.

More info: www.publicbiopsy.net.

This one-off 10-day exhibition opened in December 2006 in Bargehouse (London’s South Bank) and was curated by the Light Surgeons.
The four-storey building – a dilapidated, raw warehouse – the ligthing and atmosphere of the space lent themselves marvelously to the purpose of the show, “a journey to examine how we move through, interact with, and share the built environment”.

Spanning the interconnected themes of travelling, inhabiting cities, private/public space, the event featured audio/video installations by the Light Surgeons, talks by Scanner, Iain Sinclair on his last book ‘London, City of disappearances’, and film screenings from Onedotzero’s own ‘Digital Terrains’ programme. A couple of film/video pieces by Lenka Clayton & James Price particularly grabbed my attention: ‘conversation’, where two TV monitors playback interviews of passers-by making a judgement upon each other on the basis of appearance, thus giving a peculiar insight – not least funny – of people’s untold perceptions of each other; In the series of films ‘People in Order’, the film-makers intentionally set filming ‘rules’ contained in the title: In ‘Age’ they shot 100 people in their home, telling their age, shown in order. This was followed by ‘Relationship’, ‘Wealth’… offering as many original and alternative ways to go about documenting people and their environment.

The show also explored the dimension of travel, with some very interesting works by the Light Surgeons – one travelogue video showing upstairs, and the installation ‘transit’ on the ground floor, featuring a full-scale airport terminal hall with its luggage carrousel and passengers’ voices listing the contents of their luggage.
As Chris Thomas Allen (from the Light Surgeons) puts it: “The moment you arrive you have departed. As you leave you have begun a new experience. The fluid movements of our arrivals and departures map threads of intertwined experiences in transitory space. Within the pockets of personal space we carry memories, aspirations and secrets. These resonant whispers mark our personal cartographies in the public realm.”

www.articulatedlondon.org

Rob White’s “IBIS la bicyclette interactive” (2001) (IBIS the interactive bicycle) is an interactive installation inspired by a piece of text written by the author’s grandfather in 1909, in which he related his journey from England to Spain, through France and the Pyrenees. IBIS enables the spectator to explore that text interactively, thanks to an antique bike fitted with sensors, which gives the possibility to navigate through the time and space of the book at the desired speed.

“What would happen if street corners could talk? Some people believe that bricks and mortar can record sound vibration – that if you could unlock this you would be able to hear the history of the area played back to you.”

Daniel Belasco Rogers spent months recording stories told by local residents of the Greenwich area. In August 2006, the “Peninsula Voices” project will find out what stories are written through the pavements, using handheld computers connected by GPS, making it possible to walk round the area and hear the voices of those who lived there.

www.planbperformance.net/dan

The Folk Songs for the Five Points project was exhibited as part of SUM(1,4,6), the closing event of Node.London ‘06. In this interactive piece, users compose a ’sound-map’ by movings five plots around an onscreen map, mixing field-recordings and sounds taken from the area.

Folk Songs for the Five Points was created in response to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s invitation for a project which responded to the request for works that explore contemporary immigrant experiences in New York City. The Museum has dedicated the Digital Artist in Residence Project (DARP) as a medium where digital artists can raise questions and suggest various perspectives, ideas and interpretations.

“Folk Songs for the Five Points is a celebration of cultural diversity and change, using “folk songs” as a metaphor to explore immigration and the formation of identity in New York’s Lower East Side.
The project isn’t about absolute answers or clear definitions. We are celebrating the unexpected richness that confronts you at every turn – from the many languages of Canal St to the endless complexity contained in words like ‘immigrant’ and ‘folk song’.”

www.tenement.org/folksongs/