Leaving an imprint of ground, material and people

Olivia Milne / / Uncategorized

 

‘Familiarity may not breed contempt, but it takes the edge of admiration.’  William Hazlitt

Three cards, wandering lincoln finding places that we felt the words on the card reflected or told us to place them. I found upon reading them, that infact they were not undiscovered places the cards needed to be hidden, securely stowed. But places I walk past every day, places the words on the car reflected and I subconciously had kept account of. My own street became the new homes to two of my cards as it wasn’t until I stopped and thought, that I realised, my seemingly humble,e quite road possesed such mysterious, subtle activity. A cat roaming its pavements, lit up windows easily accessible to the curious eyes of pedestrians, voices heard through thin brick, and over gates. Again my drifting opened my narrow gaze to the enchantment of a road I walk up and down in and out of countless times a day. If it was not for the drifting opening my mindset and eyeline I would not daily be rejecting Hazlitts quote

 

Card One: ‘From here I can hear the sound of people talking and music I don’t recognise.’

Placed in Vodka Revolution booths, behind a speaker and stranger, both echoing unfamiliar words, conversations and rhythms.

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Card Two: ‘There are ruins and buildings that will eventually become ruins and people that will eventually become bodies.’

Placed on a broken wall next to my house, littered with smashed bricks and fragmented concrete blocks. Been in ruins since I have moved in, curiously nobody has ever touched it.

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Card Three: ‘ A shot from distance of other peoples houses, perhaps where a cat picking its way along the wall.’

Placed on the corner of my house, unfortunately cats were not present, but it is the exact spot where a robin sits everyday. Opposite the other side of the street lined with houses.

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The second card began to resonate with me and I felt a sense of sorrow when leaving it on such a discarded and disheveled wall. In a way I began to feel like that about our performance being left on the Grandstand. The building once so glorious is left stood alone broken and unfixed. The card reminded me of the process and hours we will have departed with when at the grandstand and eventually the remains of our performance, the odd penny it came to light later on. I had mixed feelings about finishing our piece, but hoped the messaged we left would be powerful, it began evident to me after or performance that we did not leave the message at the site. It was shared with the people that visited it as we educated them in the lives lost and they carried that away back into society hopefully sharing and questioning the message back into moving life.

The Drift

Ben Middleton / / Uncategorized

A drift put simply where you go for a walk through your local town or city with no destination or purpose in order to find the things mostly overlooked by the people who do have a purpose and a destination in their journey.  The art form of drifting has evolved from the romantic walking that came about in Europe during the late eighteenth century which was a response against the age of enlightenment that was occurring around the time ‘a reaction against the material changes in society, which accompanied the emerging and expanding industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth century’ ((Oosthoek, Jan (1999) ‘Romantic Movement, late 18th and early 19th century’ online http://www.eh-resources.org/timeline/timeline_romantic.html (accessed 25th March 2013) )) the idea was to get back to nature, that nature was the key;  the Romantic Movement was this alienation of the city and the move back to the nature because nature was seen as pure .

Drifting evolved from the Romantic Movement to being about the journey rather than on a destination (back to nature).  Instead, it has the aim of ruling out destination altogether ‘first, separation from the community, then a plunge into flux in a liminal space, finally reintegration back into the community’ ((Smith, Phil (2010) Mythogeography: The art of Walking sideways Triarchy Press))the idea of plunging into a flux is that of getting, essentially, lost; this is so you do not rely on where you are going or sign posts or directions to interrupt the flow of walking that is supposed to be coming subconsciously.  However, this form of reintegrating back into community is warned about ‘collapsing back into the everyday and missing the whole point’. In order to overcome this lapse back into the norm and forgetting all about the drift you can do little exercises or tasks to change the route or drift completely. For example, you could have the person use a large leaf as a map, or as they are walking have them look up at the tops of the buildings they walk past.

Linking the idea of drifting back to the Grandstand we can look at the old romantic walking of the eighteenth century.  The romantic walking was about getting back to routes, essentially to nature, but with the Grandstand we could look at getting back to its original use of being a racecourse. Furthermore, since the Grandstand is empty, we can look at it as a non-place, or a place generally forgotten by the public; this echoes the ideologies of drifting since the focus of a drift is to find something generally overlooked by the public.

Higher Ground

Eloise Fitt / / Uncategorized

Church Picture

In trying to find a places in which to leave my cards for our task this week, I decided to head into town. I went the back way from my house which leads me through the residential streets, past the houses that are all mainly inhabited by students. While my intention was to go all the way to town i got distracted by the surrounding area near where i live. The church in the picture is something ive seen before but never really looked at. Ive wondered why its abandoned? How long has it been like that? What will happen to it? I put the card on it because i felt that it said something more about the state of faith nowadays. If society can let a place of worship fall into decay, then whats happened to the people that used it as a place of solace, a place to rise to higher ground, have they fallen into decay too? Have they lost their sense of purpose as well as their place in faith?

Being a Part of the Drift.

Abigail Dawson / / Uncategorized

Kastner and Wallis’s typology of land art (1998) suggests involvement: “the artist in a one-to-one relationship with the land, using his or her body in forms of ritual practise” (Pearson 2010, p. 33).

During our last session we drifted in small groups, and we took this opportunity to become a part of the architecture physically. We tried to play around and find shapes and spaces that our bodies could reproduce or fit into. As Willi Dorner stated that to“see the space you also have to feel the space. Feel closer to the city. Closer to where you come from” (2005). From this we were able to become a part of the landscape around us, be physically in touch with the architecture that has been built over the years. Then we carried out a free writing task, in which we wrote down any thoughts or feelings that were going through our minds at the time of being a part of the spaces we chose. It led us to ask each other questions about how we felt, such as: what colour did you feel you were? What animal are you? If we chose the colour black and an animal such as a mole, it would suggest that in this space the person would feel rather trapped, scared perhaps and buried in this space. However  if blue and a bird was chosen it would suggest that being in the space would have made the person feel exposed, cold and able to get free if wanted to. There is a very big difference between them. This task helped us to understand and become closer to the space around us.

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The other task we were presented with was to take the two cards you were given and place them around the city according to what is said on the cards, and document it.

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The first one said I was to place it in ‘another view of where I live, this time slightly further away’, so I chose to place it from another room in my house. It was one of my housemate’s windows who has a slightly different view that I have from my own window. I chose to place is there in the hopes that when he comes home he will see the card and look out hopefully examining the view more thoroughly than before.

The second card said to place it on ‘an anonymous office block in which an unseen architect is dreaming of even higher towers’, so after a long journey around the city of Lincoln I found an office block, nothing out of the ordinary, just a plain simple building. It is situated next to Lincoln’s City Hall. Perhaps a person who passes by will read the card, look up and study the building, and wonder the many possibilities that this building may become in the following years.

Work Cited

Pearson, Mike (2010) Site Specific Performance, Palgrave Macmillan.

A Travellers Tale

Christopher Greg Sellers / / War and Loss

Since being introduced to the concept of drifting , I have done a lot of it, especially at night because my senses are more alert and  hidden aspects of things you wouldn’t normally see can be spotted.

I observed people’s style of walk , finding that there were so many different walking styles. Some people walked on an angle taking small steps indicating a nervousness and urge to escape from the situation.    Others took huge strides, leading straight forwards, implying they knew where they were heading, and nothing was going to stop this. I did notice that people on their own tended to walk a lot quicker . This was further emphasized for any hooded characters, suggesting that they want to be hidden from society too. Only a few walked with purpose but in a relaxed manner.

I needed to experiment with the touch of different surfaces. I went up to Lucy Tower and found the concrete surface left sediment after being trod on. After the recent snowy weather, the grit on the road also stuck to my shoes and littered the area. The uneven brick ground along the Brayford was slippery.

When walking at different paces,  certain senses are definitely heightened  When walking at a slow pace , the truck seams to grind to a halt. Depending on how fast I walk, the water levels seem to change too. Even the wind , when walking fast is audible and the lights in the car park seem to blend together. Finally, when observing a picture above Lincoln Theatre Royal the picture, when moving steadily, seems to move to the same rhythm as my footsteps.

Any watery surface distorts a reflection like a house of mirrors as does my reflection in a rainy car window.  When I touch smooth objects , my overall feeling is one of happiness, though if I feel something rigid I feel more alert. I could feel the uneven cobble through the soles of my shoes. Furthermore, I found that habitats could be anything , the sky is a habitat for clouds and the bin a habitat for rubbish. When trying to imagine at the cathedral that I am on Table Top  Mountain I can envisage the peaks and even though it was a cold night, I started to feel warmth through my jacket so the image had a lasting impression on my senses.

It was time to head back home, but more drifts will follow, and probably during the day to capture a different experience  My sense , emotions and imagination helped me to realize that “memory is a part of everyday experience  (Nora, 1992, p1).  Site specific performance becomes all the more interesting when that memory is lodged so that a traveller’s tale is perused  “when someone goes on a trip he has something to tell about ” (Benjamin, 1992, p84).

Work Cited

Pearson, Mike (2010) Site Specific Performance, London: Palgrave Macmillan.