image by Sheyma Buali, Brick Lane
The Invisible City was a multi-media exploration of the city around us. Bringing together artists from disciplines of film, video, photography and audio, the daylong event allowed the artists to present their work, conduct Q & A’s and end with a panel discussion.
The art or method of documenting cities has become something of a specialized niche. In London, it is an actively growing specialty, some of which is inspired by the writings and practices of Ian Sinclair, Will Self, the Situationists International, Guy Debord, and other anti-capitalist sprawl, pro-spatial poetics individuals, groups and movements. Attending meetings and events around the topic and theory of this practice, it has come to my attention that most Londoners involved tend to focus on the borough of Hackney, East London. This can be for a number of reasons such as, Hackney’s majority population being artists, Hackney being the rougher, more industrial part of London bearing a lot of texture and retaining much of the individuality other areas have lost, and/or finally, the impending London Olympics 2012 – a mammoth event that is already taking the entire London, but most intensely the borough of Hackney, by storm.
The practice of ‘deep topography’, the term introduced to us as the all-encompassing by Ian Sinclair in John Rogers’ film London Perambulator, was inspired by the resistance against community’s trajectory towards homogeneity and de-personalization as well as the celebration of details one would find when bonding with the urban surrounding. As representatives from the urbanized world, we are becoming the new wild creatures, finding solace in our unnatural habitat, filled with noise, both visual and audible, pollution, over-population, class distinction, and looming catastrophe of megapoliptic “development”. But, this is the world we live in: savage, grimy, urban. We the city dwellers, do not fight it, we relish it. We find our ways within it and flow in our softly supply enriching circles of exploration, we love where we are and have made it our homes; for generations, as communities, as families, as individuals. What we want is to retain that which has brought us to the softer side, we want the affirmation that our personal-ness will come through the brutality of the cold over-sweeping metal we are surrounded by. We want to make poetry out of the concrete and compare screeching bus halts to chirping whooping birds, we want to show and see the beauty of it all. But most of all, we want to retain all that is personal, local, individual, and valuable to the city in which we live.
The Invisible City introduced me to a number of practitioners from the various media:
At the Q & A afterwards, we spoke with John, the filmmaker. We spoke about the general practice of ‘deep topography’, bringing together images and text creating a multi-media expression of the certain urban experiences. Reflecting on our own practices as well as the film we just watched, the main questions to ask were: How do we express the city? What is it about the city that we want to express? More than just an image, our expression will have feelings, ideas, memories, fiction and more. Looking at the particularities of this film, another question comes up: How are transient spaces presented or expressed? If we are trying to portray forgotten spaces, how would we ‘show’ these spaces with all the emotion they carry?
Peter Marshall: Photographer: Lea Valley
Peter Marshall’s slide-show presentation showed us a selection of 35 plus years of photography of the Lea Valley. Lea Valley, also part of ‘regenerating’ East London, is preparing for the 2012 Olympics and going through a major re-build. Many oversized structures are being placed in spots too small for them making them seem more like plugged in pieces rather than buildings that were thought about that will ultimately lead to some kind of legacy. This leaves us with a very pertinent question: How do we think an area should be redeveloped?
Marshall’s archive, started in 1982, is now a thorough documentation. He had seen value in the areas that they photographed, areas that are today ‘heritage areas. His photography was almost entirely self-funded, but by now he has sold some prints, including ones to the Museum of London and the London Archive. One who chooses to photograph the isolated areas of the Valley, he commented, the event should not have been called The Invisible City, but The Unnoticed City; it’s all there, it’s just that nobody notices it.
Nick Hamilton: Radio Producer: Foot and Mouth
Foot and Mouth is a documentative audio piece about Hackney. Experimenting with sound effects, editing together bits of conversation, a day’s encounter on the bus, descriptions of old hangouts no longer there, directions, random interviews with people on the street, all intermingled with other street noise and ambience. Foot and Mouth a ‘psycho-geo-phonic exploration of Hackney’.
Chris Dorley-Brown: photographer: many London-based projects:
Among his projects are photographing demolition of council blocks in Hackney, revisiting spaces he photographed to re-photograph them, and looking at the convergence of two streets in his project, Corners.
Dorley-Brown took photos in the hopes of getting them in archive collections, within 10 years he was able to get his first image in the archive of the Museum of London. His images re-visiting old buildings were very illustrative. Setting them up in before and after diptychs, he took photos or buildings, streets, and most interestingly, the interiors of re-furbished buildings. The German Hospital in Hackney was recently remade into luxury flats. He went in to take photos of the differences in the interiors. A funny anecdote he told was that rumour has it Karl Marx had surgery in one of the rooms he photographed. It appears that when Marx lived in London he preferred to seek German speaking medical help. Today, the surgery room is a young couple’s dining room. When he told them the Marx-story, they appeared quite horrified. A story I found funny because of the change in what was considered ideologically by the inhabitants of the same space.
The panel discussion involved all the artists involved in the day’s event who were still there. The main question to start the discussion off was regarding the way we portray cities, how we see the cityscape.
Chaired by Francesca Panetta, she asked the panel how it is that we choose our medium. Tom Hunter was focused on first in regards to his Places of Prayer project, which he conducted with a pinhole camera. The pin-hole being a some-what marginally used one, particularly in official contexts, as well as the idea that the pinhole only captures strange and hazy images, he was asked how it is that he chose to capture the spaces with the pin-hole. Hunter explained that depending on the pinhole’s size, much can be captured and they are actually quite accurate. Also, the slow shutter actually captures more of the warmth.
image by Tom Hunter: project on Places of Prayer in Hackney (taken with pinhole)
John Rodgers reflected on his practice as a filmmaker representing places by saying that he was very inspired by the literature of the Beatniks. He felt compelled to make a video version of that literary style, bringing together spontaneity, movement and rawness. As a filmmaker, he keeps in bits of camera movement so that elusion to that is included and the viewers take that sort of trip with him.
The representative from Resonance FM (whose name I unfortunately didn’t take), to me, gave the most intriguing comments. Perhaps because I am so far placed from sound projects that I am widely interested in hearing them as well as the thought processes the go behind them. He commented on how normal it is for people to listen to ‘nature sounds’ but somehow it doesn’t seem natural to listen to the sound of Bus Route 34 or a particular street corner. For him, hearing the sounds, recording them for a couple of hours, re-listening to them and then broadcasting is a tricky thing. Not only has it gotten bad feedback, (he mentioned that people have complained they don’t want to listen to ‘real life’ on the radio) but the kind of reluctance people have against listening to what I refer to as ‘natural sound’ plays a role in his decision to broadcast it, which is quite simply an antagonistic motivation, pushing the envelope to the direction to see how far he can go with what he broadcasts.
These comments instigated a response from audience member who said that “producers of these works are re-asserting their personal attachment to places of their subject which is in contrast to the overbearing de-personalization of urban areas.”
Resonance FM responded to that by noting that the key to it all is the issue of space. Spaces, as we interact with them, as they are developing, and as they are growing in more abstract formats (social networks and so on) are changing and thus we are reacting to them more subjectively. Between the increase of the mobile phone, the corporatization of space and policed regulation (not allowed to stand places, and even more likely not allowed to take photos in many places) has brought things to a very obtrusive notice that freedom within our spaces is more and more limited, particularly as an outcome of, again – what I refer to as, capitalist sprawl. He also mentioned the point that today, we are also trying to form our private spaces by trying to decrease what we have into more concise boxes: moving from books to e-books, from CD’s to MP3’s, papers to memory keys, and so on. The digitized era is upon us, and it is mainly so we can save space.
Commenting on the acousmatics of the radio shows that appear on Resonance FM there was a lot of abstractness to what he was explaining. Working in the radio, broadcasting it into an unknown place from the listeners’ end. Muffling up the noise with accousmatics creates an unknown source as part of what is going on with the noise as well leading to a from the unknown into the unknown trajectory. There is something, as he mentioned, mysterious about this, but also the attractive part is that so much mystery is coming from the most mundane aspects of our lives, aspects that we take for granted to the point that this practice has muffled them into being the lost, forgotten, unnoticed world that we are surrounded by.
image by Sheyma Buali, Manama
