Artist’s Project: Imogen Stidworthy, 53° 27’ 46.67” N, 2° 59’ 10.35” W: Points in a Cloud

Imogen Stidworthy, video still, 2011, courtesy of Matts Gallery and the Artist

Imogen Stidworthy’s Artist’s Project is a presentation of material gathered or produced in the process of developing work, making relationships between coordinates in a network of images.

This material, including diary entries, sounds and visual material, relates to work in progress and two recent installations: The Work v.o2 and By Ours, 53° 27’ 46.67” N, 2° 59’ 10.35” W (originally commissioned for the exhibition ‘No Longer Empty’ at Liverpool Biennial 2010, a new version of this installation and The Work v.02 were both presented the solo exhibition ‘The Work’ at Kunstpavillon, Innsbruck, Nov ’10-Jan ‘11). Imogen Stidworthy will have a solo exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, London, opening May 8th 2011.


10th January 2007:

Watched an illegal demolition team at work today at an empty school in Toxteth. They were balancing on the roof ridge pulling slates off, high up against the sky with no ropes or safety equipment.

4th June 2010:

Visit P for help to arrange recording the sound of demolition, central Liverpool

The neighbourhood reflects its physical markers – pubs, bridges, shops, pathways, social and physical boundaries – in the slang and colloqualisms exchanged between people in the know.

The gashouse, the scaldies, over the bridge, the Docker’s Umbrella, the bats – each physical feature has its corollary in language. When the neighbourhood is gone language too loses its place.

L has good links with local councils and redevelopment agencies so he knows where the demolition areas are, the companies doing the work and their timetables. He tells me 168,000 houses in poor neighbourhoods in and around the city are due for demolition and regeneration.

P told me she was in Granby two weeks ago with a group of ex-residents whose houses were prepared for demolition and boarded up eight years ago, bought with compulsory purchase orders. Their houses are still there, now rapidly degenerating. Peering through the tiny holes in the aluminium hoarding, one of the ex-residents pointed out the back terrace that she and her husband had made before they left, a rockery, French windows – the fruit of years of home improvements.

15th June 2010:

Visit to demolition site, north Liverpool.

There were three men on this site today demolishing the houses up one side of the street and then working their way back down the other side. S the foreman told me that the demolition in Liverpool is done by companies from Manchester and the demolition in Manchester by companies from Liverpool.

It’s surprisingly delicate work, the digger arm operates with graceful, precise movements; it works strategically, knocking down wall and floor sections from the front towards the back until it can lift the roof off in its entirety and place it in one piece on the ground. In between, the men move in to systematically sort and recycle, taking out the good bricks and floorbeams, flinging fragments of past households onto piles on one side.

Everything is sold or taken away: the bricks go to a Manchester brickyard to be cleaned, sorted and sold on to build luxury developments in Chester, York – and Japan; the floorboards are salvaged by companies big and small; all the lead and the copper from the electric cables was stripped and sold long ago.

There are no people around here apart from the demolition men, and an old lady who refuses to leave the house she was born in 80 years ago – but it’s not always like this: T told me, “Anfield – that was the worst! It’s Beirut down there, it’s Beirut! They’d throw bricks at us – they’d be on the job, taking what they could get to sell, but they’d be throwing bricks and slates at us all the whole time, too. You had to work with your back to them or you’d get hit in the face. Every evening when we left the site we’d have to wind our windows down in the truck so they wouldn’t get broken, because the whole lot of those kids would be waiting for us, about thirty of them on either side of the truck, to throw bricks at us”.

28th July 2009:

Interview with D, police expert in witness interview techniques, Wavertree Police Station, Liverpool.

D told me that even the most truthful witness can seem to be following a pre-written, somehow familiar script, and that part of his job is to foil the narrative impulse, which can divert the mind from concentrating on details of a memory. He will unexpectedly ask what the witness can smell, or hear, or taste at a given moment, or go against the narrative sequence by asking them to describe a suspect in detail from the feet up, or to recount events in reverse order of occurence. He also told me that if a witness is traumatised, that can destroy the impulse and even the capacity to narrativise – to construct sequence and consequence from lived experience.

21st June 2009:

Meeting with D, veteran of Yugoslav and Iraq wars, central Liverpool.

D was posted in Bosnia. His voice has a rattling, rasping grain, except when he is very relaxed. He didn’t fight in the army, he was a cook – the most direct engagement he had with the enemy was guarding prisoners of war at the base in Bosnia, a disused mine built on concrete stilts.

I structured the conversation with D with cognitive interview techniques I learned from S: working around the event in close, not-quite-repeating circles, reducing the time frame and the scale of physical space focused on, with each turn. D remembers everything about the fabric of the building, it seems it was its very indifference that drew him to scrutinise and absorb its surfaces, and drove their details deeper into his memory:

Brick dust, dirty cream, browny beige, damp plaster you can scrape your fingernails on, the metallic creak of the bunk bed lying perpendicular to the wall, the smell of the pillow, bags of thick wire filled with stones to protect the sleeping quarters, the one bag that was missing on the other side of the wall from his bunk: too many images and only one single image that he couldn’t get out of his head day and night, and all the time he was there: a bullet coming through the wall, between his legs and out through the top of his head.

Why his family can’t accept his condition, and why they can’t understand it, he told me, is because there is nothing to see.

“ … I went about like a sleepwalker, past houses of which only the facades were left standing, smoke-blackened brick walls and fields of rubble… at length I came upon a cleared site where the bricks retrieved from the ruins had been stacked in long, precise rows, ten by ten by ten, a thousand to every stacked cube, or rather nine hundred and ninety-nine, since the thousandth brick in every pile was stood upright on top, be it as a token of expiation or to facilitate the counting.” (WG Sebald describing the streets of Berlin in 1947, ‘Rings of Saturn’ p.177)

23th June 2009:

23th June 2009. Meeting in the studio with R, a veteran of the Falklands war, who now has PTSD, and his wife L, central Liverpool.

Remote conflicts effecting the here and now, the repetition of imagery, and the necessity for other forms of image to make other kinds of relation to them.

R fought in the Falklands 20 years ago, he comes from south Liverpool in one of the army’s richest recruiting grounds, the North West – a poor neighbourhood in one of the poorest regions in the country. He talks in a fast, continuous, waterfall of words as though he can’t afford to stop – it really is as though he’s running away from himself. He told me about the terms of conflict: you engage in an operation; you are sanitised – you remove all personal, identifying effects; go forward into theatre; you swipe in and swipe out; dead ground.

November 11th 2010:

Email from J, Eternal Tour exhibition, East Jerusalem

From: j

Date: Thur, 11 Nov 2010 22:00:13 +0100

Subject: Re: Your installation / poster sites

Dear Imogen,

I’m thinking about a space for your demolition laser scans, would you like them to be in a demolished house location for example, OR in Bustan neighborhood – Silwan- where Israeli authorities want to demolish 88 houses to build ” the David Garden” – if the situation cools down there?

June 30th 2009:

Meeting with S, police wiretapper, Antwerp.

S is fluent in seven languages and can recognise thousands of dialects, so he can locate and read a recorded voice with great accuracy and in many senses, in terms of language of course but also of the age, body type, physical location, cultural background, and the tone and nuances of the voice. S has been blind since the age of twelve, but his speech is full of visual analogies – when a partially blind friend stopped to say hello to us, S greeted him with ‘Hello Blinde!’.

When he’s working on a difficult recording he finds it helps to close his eyes – although they see nothing – and sits without moving, sometimes for two or three hours. His colleagues become confused, and can no longer tell whether he is concentrating intensely or simply asleep.

We were sitting on a terrace in the Dagraadplaats in Antwerp and a man who had been playing the accordion behind him for a while came round to ask us for money, in Flemish, with a tense, closed expression on his face. S recognised his accent and answered him directly in Romany. Suddenly the man’s face opened up, and they had a short, lively chat.

When we parted S walked off with his dog and his white stick, and his head cocked to one side to listen to the automatic voice of a gps machine strapped to his shoulder.

From: j

Sent: 01 November 2010 17:26:45

Dear Imogen

I spoke with J S from Wadi hilweh information center and also Mada orgnisation in Silwan they are giving us the space you need for the installation, it is in Silwan which is affected by Israeli demolitions like any other arab neighbourhood in east Jerusalem the Mada center is situated othe main stret in silwan and you will get pictures of it soon :).

anywhere in Palestinian areas is possible BUTTT it is not possible for us to put your work, the posters, in Israeli areas because it will be TOO provocative and could be taken as a political thing and people can go to long interrogations by Israeli Authorities specially your local Partners (i.e me for example 🙁 )

17th August 2009:

Meeting with C, backslang speaker, Toxteth

C’s Grandmother used to tell dirty jokes in backslang and it was she who taught it to him – jokes so rude, he said, that she could never have told them in English; all her friends who laughed at them in backslang would have been scandalised and thought she was coarse and vulgar.

Backslang grew out of extreme economic and social limitations – C told me that as a child they were so poor they had absolutely nothing, but at least they had their own language. It was used as a protection against anyone overhearing private jokes or sensitiive information, especially the police. The second or third vowels of a word are replaced with the sounds ag, ab, or arrab, so that to the uninitiated speech becomes an impenetrable surface of confusing sounds. Linguistic camouflage for a protected social space. C told me that backslang is often used in prison to communicate between the cells (S, the police interviewer, also told me this); they can send tiny camouflaged spaces of free speech along the exposed corridors of the most controlled of institutions.

January 18th 2009:

When Solzhenitsin wrote his novel ‘The First Circle’ in 1958, he pre-empted the work of the Soviet censors by pre-censoring his own book, removing several chapters and changing the title from ‘In the First Circle’ to ‘The First Circle’ – perhaps he felt it would carry less of an association with Dante’s ‘Inferno’.

”As you know from personal experience, a prisoner’s hearing is the most vital of all senses. His sight is usually restricted by walls, shutters and screens, his sense of smell is blunted by foul aromas, and there is nothing new on which he can exercise his sense of touch. His hearing, on the other hand, develops to a remarkable degree. However far away may be, every sound is instantly identified; they can tell whether they are due for exercise, or whether someone is getting a parcel. They signal what is going on in the prison and mark the passage of time.” (‘The First Circle’, Solzhenitsin, released 1968).

August 2010:

Meeting at the demolition site to make the 3d laser scan.

It took over two hours hours to scan the demolition site, while the demolition team took an extended tea break. The scanner rotates slowly on a tripod at head height around 360 degrees while a mirror inside spins extremely fast, deflecting 40,000 laser beams in every direction. 40,000 points recording the precise coordinates of the area, the remaining stretch of a row of houses, traces of deeply inscribed pathways around and between them and the disorder of scattered rubble. The image produced from a basic rendering of the raw data is both hyper-real and skeletal. It looks almost photographic, but there is no optical mechanism to the making of image; laser is light, of course, but to make the scan it acts more like sound waves so the principle behind it is closer to hearing than to sight. The data from five different scanning positions will be assimilated to make a single cloud of 200,000 points, exhaustively defining the topography of the site in the final hour of no. 46 Willard St, which can later be viewed as a simulation from any position, real or imagined: a conquest of space.

9th December 2010:

Email from T, Eternal Tour exhibition, East Jerusalem.

From: t [9th December 2010]

Date: Thur 9 Dec 2010 10:15:40 +0100

Subject: Re: Your installation / thanks to Jalal, Bashar and Gabriele

Dear Imogen,

thank you for your mail

I really wanted to thank J and B.

Honestly, it was really risky buisness for both.

Not for me, as european girl, or for others tourists, but really for them, as palestinians young men. I don’t want to be too dramatical, but i’m speaking about physical risk. I was with them during all the process before the festival and before your presentation, and you need to understand how big the pression was. Silwan is really a place of war. It’s note a joke. They couldn’t come with me in the settlement of Silwan, or in the Jewish quarter, to put the posters, because they were afraid of being put in jail. And the day before your presentation, a young palestinian was killed exactly in front of the place where we should do your installation. We could not install the demolition sound of your work there after that, that is why we put it in the tent.

15th December 2010:

Email from T, Geneva.

Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:10:40 +0100

Subject: Re: Your installation / poster sites

From: t [16th December 2010]

please find here the photos of your posters in Jerusalem : I took myself the pictures, and I put also the posters with B for the first one (Silwan), with A for two others (Damaskus Gate and Jewish Quarter) and with P for the last one (settlement in Silwan). The last one had been taken down already by somebody when I went to photograph it so I have no photo of it.

The black area in the laser scan is the only place that cannot be recorded and represented, and the position from which all the information is generated: the space where the scanner is standing. The position is indicated by an absence of data identical to the undefined space where the image runs out, at the edges. The position from which we are looking now is a virtual point about 8m above the ground looking back to this blind spot, from which it generates a digital gaze back towards itself, in an impossible closed circuit of self-reflection.


Imogen Stidworthy is a British multimedia artist based in Liverpool. Her work is represented in the LUX Collection

 

Related

Skip to content