Month: February 2013

Muted in Metal

Daniel Ridealgh / / A Restoration

The Lincoln grandstand hosted the Lincolnshire handicap race for 111 years before its move to Doncaster.  For over a century this ground was one of the busiest places in the county.

On the latest exploration however, we found this…Where's the announcement?

The remnants of an old Tannoy system.  The very voice of the stand, now robbed.  Years of commentary and race announcements silenced, with not even an echo in the air that could hint towards the atmosphere of the past.  Imagine walking up to the stand on race days, the smell of horses and hot food, the sight of a crowd squeezing themselves onto the stand, but picture that without the sound from the loudspeaker directing people of the day’s entertainment.

The voice could still be existent somewhere in the venue, but it would be behind a parameter of iron.

Another gateA close up of the back of the Grandstand Side gate

Metal gates and bars surround the grandstand now,  giving out a sense of entrapment and imprisonment.  The initial response to this is how the atmosphere of what the stand was before, is now changed to one of an eerie, dark and dangerous place.  The lives, the voices of the past and the stand itself is now guarded under lock and key.  A place that once brought excitement, now an emptying space.

How can the sounds of the past be recreated and where would anyone begin?  The grandstand itself was a means to (unintentionally) infuse two separate comings together; the races and the RAF base.   Mike Pearson states that the answers start from the site itself through exploring ‘ two basic orders: that which is of the site, its fixtures and fittings, and that which is brought to the site, the performance and its scenography’ (2010, p.35).  The images above show what is of the site, but that which was brought to the site will be the challenge to locate.  The Lincolnshire handicap, the biannual three day race, moved to Doncaster in 1965.  The RAF activity during the war ceased and now operates in surrounding bases.  Although there is nothing being brought to the site that relates to its past today, these events ‘are inseparable from their sites, the only contexts within which they are intelligible’ (Pearson, 2010, p. 35).

First Impressions…

Phoebe Wall-Palmer / / Personal Posts, Women of War

‘I don’t particularly mind waste, but I think it’s a pity not to know what one is wasting. Some old ladies use pound notes as bookmarks: This is silly only if it is absent-minded.’ ((Brook, Peter (2008) The Empty Space, London: Penguin Classics, p. 45))

Walking through an open space, or down a street, the details are missed. Of course it’s not until you consciously look for something that you notice the details, the intricacies of both the man-made and the natural. You also begin to develop something seemingly uninteresting into an installation piece, or as if there was motive behind randomly placed coincidences. I guess we can all find art in anything; it’s how you perceive it.

Our first visit to the Grandstand conjured the same feeling: what was waste and what was wanted?

‘In what guise do I visit?’ ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 19)), is a question Mike Pearson suggests asking oneself before visiting a site. As students, we have the intention and motive in finding potential for art, in a place that could have been previously neglected. An employee of Lincoln County Council guided us around the rooms of the Grandstand. He told us what he could about the history of the site, but seemed bemused by our excitement of the small, ostensibly insignificant, aspects to each room.

 ‘Yet with the freedom to loiter, to witness and interpret passing scenes and incidents, diverse activities, unpredictable juxtapositions, fleeting occurrences, multifarious sights and sounds… Gazing, grazing, consuming.’ ((Ibid, p. 20))

We all began finding interesting spaces, with the original architecture in mind; we could place performance and art within the existing walls. For example, the corridor below stretched along half of the length of the building. The natural darkness and eeriness invited the possibility of using projections, or introducing light in different ways to transform a corridor into a performance. The particular space is currently wasted. This allowed us to see a blank canvas for a performance potential.

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One of the rooms in particular seemed to inspire and surprise all of us. The war memorial below encouraged a whole new strand to our ideas, originally thinking that horse racing would be at the forefront of our research and the final piece.

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It was not long before we all felt passionate that the Grandstand deserved to have a voice returned to it. Another of Pearson’s questions to consider is: ‘am I simply enthralled by the place? Or is it difficult to know where it ends and I begin?’ ((Ibid, p. 21)) After I left the site I felt some sort of ownership and pride in the Grandstand, I was enthralled by it’s history and potential for our work. The whole site is wasted now, only used for the odd fitness class or brass band rehearsal- it is not being celebrated and treated with the grandeur it deserves; it is the gateway to Lincoln. It’s an exciting prospect to think that we will become part of its history.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Non-Places and the personal

Stephenie Clubley / / Uncategorized

“Walking through
the underpass
under Cold Blow Lane
near Millwall
football ground
surrounded by mad fans
fighting
and police
while carrying two bags
of food and drink
I just walked
through it all
like walking through a film”

(Mirza/Butler, 1999)

In this ‘age of information’ we are constantly immersed in multimedia everywhere we look. For someone living in this age, it is quite easy to imagine your personal life as a film. As day to day events unfold and coincidences reveal themselves, they can become interlinked in ways that sometimes seem like they must have been scripted.

This illusory ‘film’ of your life is something only you will ever be able to see through your own unique viewpoint. No two people experience the same sights and sounds around them in the exact same way. If you were a Hollywood producer striving to recreate someone’s life on the big screen, you would edit out the majority of the mundane and the everyday. People would be interested in watching the immediate events leading up to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, but less so in watching the three hours spent on an aeroplane between Washington D.C. and Dallas.

Marc Augé states that “If a place can be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.” (1995, p.77-78) However this does not prevent non-places like airports, bus stops and elevators from becoming  concerned with identity on an individual level. This is exemplified in Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s film extract of ‘Non Places‘, where personal experiences are written as subtitles and laid over monochrome shots of ordinary walkways and stairwells. These places are not unfamiliar to anybody who has visited an urban area, but the subtitles illuminate invisible echoes of inner thoughts. “…the personal voice, translated into subtitles. There is no voice-over, so the lines are read, as it were, in the viewer’s own head. Personal memory, which might be thought alien to the very idea of a non-place, is here drawn close to it.” (Rees, 1999)

Mirza and Butler bring the personal in the non-place to light by evoking subconscious memories of non-places within the viewer that they may have previously overlooked.  “Some shots evoke an oblique connection between the story and the image – a train passes as the text refers to a railway station – but others imply a greater distance, a space for the viewer to fill by drawing on their own memories.” (Rees, 1999)

This ‘space for the viewer to fill’ invites the viewer to consider non-places with a dormant significance. Perhaps next time they pass such a non-place, they may find themselves smiling as they remember it afresh as their main meeting point for friends in their first year at university; the place where they sheltered from the rain the one time they locked themselves out of the house; or the first pedestrian crossing where their crush held their hand while waiting for the green light.

 

Works Cited:

Chance

Lauren Olerenshaw / / War and Loss

Day to day we are arrogant to our surroundings, we remain in our own world’s. However when we take the time, the time to drift, suddenly everything becomes clearer and in sharp focus, are senses come alive. We have the chance to notice and see things we wouldn’t usually see.

We took part in an exercise where we were told to complete a journey using an object to decide the direction of our journey, we decided to use a coin and so flipped the coin a total of 15 times, its face decided whether we would turn left or right on our journey. If a tail appeared we would turn left and a head was to turn right, the route to our journey was left to chance. The results of our journey were: tails appearing 5 times and heads appearing 10 times. Although we hoped our destination would be the 3rd floor of the main administration building in Lincoln University (a place we had never explored before) the coin produced a tail and led us on a left turn to a door with a ‘no entry’ sign. This meant we could not continue our journey, the coin decided where we would go. It was left to chance.

Every time we leave our homes, we take a chance. When we drive our cars or take the bus we take a chance we will arrive safe. When we go to a restaurant and we try something new we chance whether we will like it or not. When having an operation although the operation may have a 60% success rate we take a chance on whether we will pull through. Soldiers take a chance with their lives every day. If a fallen soldier had the chance to decide, it’s easy to assume what he would choose. If the soldiers had facts and statistics to help aid them with what they chose, they would maybe reconsider their options. But that’s the point in chance, you never no, and soldiers accept that, and in their own way come to terms with being at risk every day.

We wanted to explore chance, and what happens when you leave things to chance, what are the results and outcomes? Unpredictable.

On Site Drifting

Jordan Benjamin Holland / / Personal Posts

Today we had a session at the Lincoln Grandstand, which has become our performance site. We were given one task to carry out and a few questions to ponder and note down our thoughts whilst on site.

The task was – To seek out traces, archaeological traces of other (former) visitors and occupants. This task is modified from a question of the same wording found in the following source ((Pearson, M (2010) Site-Specific Performance Palgrave Macmillan: London. Page 21))

The questions were – How am I affected? What do I feel? What do I perceive? What do I experience? How far is this informed by predispositions and previous experience? To what do I attend – natural landscape, built environment, sky as well as land, night as well as day and in foul weather as well as fare? Upon my return, how do I reconstitute ‘there’ here? These questions were taken from the following source ((Pearson, M (2010) Site-Specific Performance Palgrave Macmillan: London. Page 22))

When I first got on site I began to look for any traces of people being at the site at any period in time. The following pictures are what I documented whilst carrying out this task.

People Here 1 This first photograph is of some rubbish left by a person who was on the site.

 

 

People Here 3 This photograph of the sign ‘Main Entrance’ would only need to be in place if people use the site. Because it is in place, people clearly are using the site.

 

 

People Here 4 This photograph is of disabled parking bays, which is strong evidence that this site is in use.

 

 

People Here 5 This photograph of a ‘Drop Off Point’ is another piece of evidence to suggest that the site is regularly used.

 

 

People Here 10 Similar to the two photographs above, this is an image of the car park. If the site was not in use why would there be a car park?

 

 

People Here 9 This is a photograph of a bench found on site, so whoever it was that erected the bench is trying to make the site appealing for visitors who may use the site for a picnic.

 

 

People Here 11 This final image is of a visitor to the site’s car.  This is the strongest piece of evidence that there are other people beside myself and our class using the site.

 

The above photographs are of my first attempt at seeking out traces, archaeological traces of other (former) visitors and occupants. The first photograph showing the remains of what was left by someone on site leading up to the last photograph of someone on site. However, it wasn’t until I really started to search closer on the actual site itself that I realized there were clearly traces of others who had been there before me. The following photographs are what I documented of these new traces.

Grafitti 1 Someone called ‘Danny’ from what I could make out was leaving his mark of being on site.

 

 

Grafitti 2 Next to Danny’s mark was the mark of ‘Jenny’ who had also been on the site.

 

 

Grafitti 3 An anonymous drifter perhaps? Whoever they were, they too left their mark on the site.

 

 

Grafitti 4 Possibly builders leaving a mark of where underground wires are? They too left their mark on site.

 

 

Grafitti 5 Could this mark have been left by the same person who left the above mark?

 

 

Grafitti 6 Maybe some children chalked up a goal on the wall? They left their mark on the site as well.

 

 

Memorial Stone 1 Although I could not make out the names on the stone, this photograph is of a memorial stone placed within the site’s architecture. I presume that the names are those who were most involved in erecting the site.

 

After discovering the traces shown above I had some answers to the questions we had been asked.

How am I affected? I was inspired by these traces of previous visitors. I see them as a way of trying to be remembered, as if by leaving your mark on a site you are some how leaving a memory of yourself being there for others to see.

What do I feel? I felt that, like those who came before me, through the photographs I had taken at the site, I was leaving my mark at the site as well. The photographs are evidence that I had been at the site as well.

What do I perceive? There were lots of visual marks of past visitors, it was as if I was in an art gallery looking at other peoples’ signatures.

What do I experience? I experienced 2 strong feelings. The first was the thought that people wanted to be remembered. As if the goal wasn’t to live forever, but instead to create a lasting memory in other people’s minds, even those who had never met them. The second was that as I was taking more photographs, and gathering more evidence that I had been to the site as well, I was becoming amalgamated with those who had been before me, as if we were all one collective. We were all drifters and this was our site.

How far is this informed by predispositions and previous experience? I had never been to the site before, I had only heard a small part of the site’s history but nothing specific about the site in terms of it’s aesthetics, so I went with as open a mind as I could.

To what do I attend – natural landscape, built environment, sky as well as land, night as well as day and in foul weather as well as fare? I struggled with this question initially, but after finding all of the traces on the walls, many of which had already stood the test of the weather, I decided that it didn’t matter what natural or man made circumstances occurred on site, only that these traces were not disturbed.

Upon my return, how do I reconstitute ‘there’ here? For this I drew a marking on a piece of paper which read ”Jonny Was Ere’ to illustrate my idea that people leave markings to be remembered.

I feel that investigating the 2 concepts of 1) leaving your own mark on the site and 2) becoming one with those who came before you will enable me to produce a performance on the site, for the site and inspired by the site.