I've begun to consider the city, not the city I live in or have lived in but the city as heterotopia - the imaginary of the city as it perceives itself.
I love that Xenakis allows the city and buildings to be subject rather than object - I WANT this city, my city to have a voice and opinions.
I also want to focus my post-doc work on this idea of the city and this requires me to finish my thesis - a scary proposition!
So I've been collecting images of my city from all the cities I visit or learn of and file them carefully for this future work and I've begun a project called reading the pavement. Its simple work, i walk and take photographs and begin to attempt to read these images as text. Its difficult but I'm loving that I'm learning.
So here are some of my images and the first of the writing of the reading.
And here is the piece Ive been writing:
Reading the pavement.
I’ve started a file
of photographs of pavements I walk and the idea of reading them occurred to me
some time ago. This suggests the pavement has become in some way a text that is
possible to read and this supposes language and syntax and the possibility of
meaning.
The elements within
such an analysis are both within the photographs themselves and within the
relations between photographs. I walk the footpath and take photographs of
items and scenes which intrigue me. Usually this is a visual engagement,
although I love to collect rusted and flattened bottle tops and other small
objects which have been affected by their presence on the footpath. I
particularly love what happens to corrugated cardboard in this environment and
I hold them for the tactile experiences they allow. My daughter and my sister
dislike that I pick up these objects; such things are dangerous, and may hold
contagions. These are nonspecific but harmful and by picking up these things I
am endangering myself and also my family. Such things they tell me are
disgusting and should be left in situ. When questioned they cannot be specific
but they know these things are dirty and they know I should not be handling
them.
I read the footpath
as a new learner approaches initial readers. I need simple syntax, simple
words, simple structure; the subtle nuances of my visual understanding still escape my ability to unravel their
presence in the interaction of the text with its imagery, it confuses me I
cannot articulate my understanding. I am reading the pictures not the text and
whilst this allows me to create the narrative of the footpath it does not allow
the subtle interpretation I crave.
This gap between what
I understand and what I can explain frustrates me; it causes me to spend hours
looking at the images I have made and the relationships I assume between them.
I assume extra data and use this to create possibilities within my reading.
Positioning becomes important and time; a relationship between me, these
objects and the processes which have placed them here. I consider removing them
from that context, allowing them only their immediate and visually apparent
context. I will read the text as it is written not with a subtext or an implied
text, this becomes difficult. For example I am intrigued by bottle tops; as
objects they are functional, they hold things in bottles but once removed they
become detritus and merge slowly with the footpath. I collect them because they
intrigue me and I find uses for them in my collages, but to read them places
them in an entirely different category.
Sometimes they are
solitary, flipped from a bottle and left in the gutter. Here they rust slowly
and the small spiked edges allow them to become small receptacles for smaller
objects that collect in gutters that are not regularly swept clean.
I find them in
parking buildings and have often walked down all of the isles picking up these
small rusted discs and putting them in my bag to take home. These tops tell a
different story. Flattened by the wheels of the cars that park here every day
the rusting process carves into the material in subtle ways. Some are flattened
evenly and others into ellipsoids. On one of these collections I was helped by
a woman who on sking me what i had lost and was searching for was fascinated
enough by my answer to want to experience what i was doing. A trio of young
people from the nearby bottle store pointed me in the direction of a small
hoard of tops and explained, ‘That’s
where the guys sit and drink at night.’ Much as they sat smoking, leaving a
pile of cigarette butts others gather to drink.
I am reminded of the
underground car park at the Housing Commission tower in South Melbourne,
advertised at the inception of the tower as a huge advantage to the tower
dwellers but now locked and empty because as the commission worker I met there
said, ‘People just kept doing bad stuff
down here.’ Also reminded of Jack in my reading group who told me he and
his friends would go down to the back of the parking basement to smoke dope
because, ‘No one’s gonna come down here
to find us.’
Walking the footpath
I look for these markers, these words in an alphabet that writes a story of the
city in which I live and compile a list of objects and construct the field
within which I will examine them. I am checking both the words and the book in
which they are held before I begin to read.
I think to read
graffiti walls in the same way. These are not barriers nor are they markers,
they are pages and can be read in the same way footpaths can be read. Layers of
image, paint and paper, glue and stencil there are layers of narrative here
too. I come here to peel the layers of pained paper to create collages and to
remake these objects for my own meanings. I write in fiction the stories of the
city I cannot quite read in the footpaths and walls.
