Kent C. Ryden's incredible book Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing and the Sense of Place is availiable in full on Google books, for free! I can't recommend reading this book enough: It was a huge influence on my practical essay. Its pretty annoying reading on a screen...but i'd suggest you read the prologue and the first chapter at least.
Click here to read it.
Tuesday, 8 December 2009
The Glue Society: Playing with Arial photography
The Australian based arts collective The Glue Society recently made four fake arial photos of biblical events. In a time of the all-encompassing Google Earth, its an interesting challenge to attempts to map every single bit of our existance: it demonstrates a failure to represent place over space.
James Dive, a founding member of The Glue Society says: “We like to disorientate audiences a little with all our work. And with this piece we felt technology now allows events which may or may not have happened to be visualized and made to appear dramatically real. As a method of representation satellite photography is so trusted, it has been interesting to mess with that trust."
The Parting of the Red Sea
Noah's Ark
The Garden of Eden
The CrucifixionBLDGBLOG: California Ghost Town
I'd like to draw your attention to my favourite blog: BLDGBLOG. Its a brilliant and diverse look at how we construct our world: it encompasses mapping, city planning, architecture, weather systems...everything. Geoff Manaugh is a prolific writer - he posts at least once a day - its brilliant to keep up to date with.This particular post on the failed city development project California City is something I find particularly exciting. It is a 'geoglyph of nowehere', particularly interesting if we're looking at a city in terms of our stories. I don't want to describe it too much (because Geoff does it so much better than me!) but take some time to check it out. Click on the picture to view the post.
Monday, 7 December 2009
What's left behind....
again, another entry previously posted on my other blog. This is one of the buildings we could go explore.
The Ghosts linger longer than they should. There's something unfinished about it, the way they just left. Nothing was tidied away, nothing was hidden. It feels too much like a document, too real to be palpable.
Temple Works In Holbeck, Leeds is re-opening as a multi purpose arts space. TW began as an old flax mill and, until recently, was the distribution centre for Kay's catalogue.
The current exhibition, Final Days explores the site as it was found: the hastily abandoned offices of Kay's depot have been left untouched until now. Grease still stains the Kitchen wall, cups are left where they were placed, cleaning equipment left to rot. Signs are awkwardly outdated, the whole building seems to bare itself embarrassingly, one feels they shouldn't be seeing it in this state.
The Ghosts linger longer than they should. There's something unfinished about it, the way they just left. Nothing was tidied away, nothing was hidden. It feels too much like a document, too real to be palpable.
Temple Works In Holbeck, Leeds is re-opening as a multi purpose arts space. TW began as an old flax mill and, until recently, was the distribution centre for Kay's catalogue.
The current exhibition, Final Days explores the site as it was found: the hastily abandoned offices of Kay's depot have been left untouched until now. Grease still stains the Kitchen wall, cups are left where they were placed, cleaning equipment left to rot. Signs are awkwardly outdated, the whole building seems to bare itself embarrassingly, one feels they shouldn't be seeing it in this state.
Sunday, 6 December 2009
We Were Here
Yesterday 13 of the 16 people who graduated from my year all came back to Leeds for a lovely reunion. It got me thinking a lot about this project. When they left, certain places took on a different significance. Walking away from saying goodbye to Holly and Ruth I thought about this quote from De Certeau:
“Through stories about places, they become inhabitable. Living is narativising. Stirring up or restoring this narativising is thus also among the tasks of any renovation. One must awaken the stories that sleep in the streets and that sometimes lie within a simple name. If “an event is what one recounts”, the city only has a story, only lives by preserving its memories.”
The city changed. Certain things stood out. Certain street corners were invested with a newly-charged significance. What is home in this respect? Home is not a place, it's a collection of constantly shifting experiences, ghosts, stories. A city then is a collection of these stories. It's a place written and re-written, it exists in multiplicity.
Here's something I wrote a while ago...
We Were Here
What am I scared of forgetting?
That we were here.
Simply here, sharing space.
Crossing sightlines:
I was with you, here.
And we'll always be here.
folded and unfolded, photos like tawdry maps.
Echoes that cause walls to stir,
whispering we were here, here we were.
“Through stories about places, they become inhabitable. Living is narativising. Stirring up or restoring this narativising is thus also among the tasks of any renovation. One must awaken the stories that sleep in the streets and that sometimes lie within a simple name. If “an event is what one recounts”, the city only has a story, only lives by preserving its memories.”
The city changed. Certain things stood out. Certain street corners were invested with a newly-charged significance. What is home in this respect? Home is not a place, it's a collection of constantly shifting experiences, ghosts, stories. A city then is a collection of these stories. It's a place written and re-written, it exists in multiplicity.
Here's something I wrote a while ago...
We Were Here
What am I scared of forgetting?
That we were here.
Simply here, sharing space.
Crossing sightlines:
I was with you, here.
And we'll always be here.
folded and unfolded, photos like tawdry maps.
Echoes that cause walls to stir,
whispering we were here, here we were.
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
Ice Work: Tim Etchells Blog
I showed you guys some of Hugo Glendinning's Ice portraits earlier. He's been working on more ice sculptures in collaberation with Tim Etchells. Click on the picture to see the full set.
While we're at it, Tim Etchells blog is a really fantastic resourse: he's a fantastic writer and he posts very regularly. Click here to view his notebook.
Eavan Boland - That the the Science of Cartography is Limited...
This was something I originally posted on my (crap) blog Strange Weather:
I thought that this would be a nice starting point to open up a discussion on representing landscapes. This poem in particular strikes me as a good entry point in which to tackle ideas of multiple, overlapping interpritations of the same space. A video version of Boland reading the poem is availiable here.
That the the Science of Cartography is Limited...
"I was certainly aware, long before I wrote this poem, that the act of mapmaking is an act of power and that I--as a poet, as a woman and as a witness to the strange Irish silences which met that mixture of identities--was more and more inclined to contest those acts of power. The official version-and a map is rarely anything else--might not be suspect as it discovered territories and marked out destinations. But the fact that these roads, so powerful in their meaning and so powerless at their origin, never showed up on any map of Ireland seemed to me then, as it does now, both emblematic and ironic."
Boland acts to reinscribe the map, taking action and drawing attention to a history of forgotton individuals - something painfully symbolised in the unfinished paths. By uncovering the lost famine roads, Boland gives voice to the silenced, it is a brave reclaiming of history, and contributes to an ongoing post-colonial practice of re-examining historical validity. This can be seen a lot in Boland's poetry - particularly in the collection from which this poem comes: In a Time of Violence (1995). Readers may also want to look at The Dolls Museum in Dublin and In a Bad Light from the same collection.
I thought that this would be a nice starting point to open up a discussion on representing landscapes. This poem in particular strikes me as a good entry point in which to tackle ideas of multiple, overlapping interpritations of the same space. A video version of Boland reading the poem is availiable here.
That the the Science of Cartography is Limited...
-and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
"I was certainly aware, long before I wrote this poem, that the act of mapmaking is an act of power and that I--as a poet, as a woman and as a witness to the strange Irish silences which met that mixture of identities--was more and more inclined to contest those acts of power. The official version-and a map is rarely anything else--might not be suspect as it discovered territories and marked out destinations. But the fact that these roads, so powerful in their meaning and so powerless at their origin, never showed up on any map of Ireland seemed to me then, as it does now, both emblematic and ironic."
Boland acts to reinscribe the map, taking action and drawing attention to a history of forgotton individuals - something painfully symbolised in the unfinished paths. By uncovering the lost famine roads, Boland gives voice to the silenced, it is a brave reclaiming of history, and contributes to an ongoing post-colonial practice of re-examining historical validity. This can be seen a lot in Boland's poetry - particularly in the collection from which this poem comes: In a Time of Violence (1995). Readers may also want to look at The Dolls Museum in Dublin and In a Bad Light from the same collection.
Tim Etchells & Hugo Glendinning: Empty Stages
Well Ain't The Guardian great...I mentioned this project earlier and lone behold they've done a feature on it the very same day. Hoorah for liberals.
Click here to look at the collection.
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Another Place: Antony Gormley
I'd advise everyone to watch this documentary on Antony Gormley. Gormley was one of the primary reasons I began to think about this project, and the documentary touches on a lot of the themes that we're going to be looking at. Click here to view it.
Its also great to look at his website: he has a huge catalogue of work all documented on there. Click here for that.
There's a Gormley sculpture (I forget which one it is...perhaps Learning To See or Moment) in the first floor room in The Henry Moore Institute if you fancy looking.
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