Last week, my friend Tom Croll-Knight, sent out this recording, which was played on the BBC. Tom is a researcher, sound artist, producer and DJ, currently living in Paris and working on the doctorate in Human Geography at The University of Sheffield, UK.
This particular recording includes his field recordings of various locations in Paris, along with his own commentary, in rhyme no less!
Listen up:
Legendary street photographer Bill Cunningham is an observer of subtle shifts in the city’s seasons and moods. On his walks and bike rides around town he takes pictures that together constitute an archive of the ephemeral: style.
In his January 23 dispatch from the streets he discusses the way footwear, in this case the high-heeled ankle boot, can define an era. He points out the 7-year life cycle of the fashion trend, which go hand in hand with shifts in the relationship between ankle-boot-wearing women and their urban environment.
Being one such ankle-boot-wearing New York lady, I appreciate Bill’s sensitivity to the huge difference a shoe makes in posture and movement–in the way I travel through city streets, in my body’s lines of flight. He picks up on the crossed-leg posture that seems to come with the shoes. While I’m not a leg-crosser, the way I stand, my attitude, the way I imagine the potentials in my relationship to other walkers is certainly shaped in no small way by the sort of shoes I wear. One might say that choosing shoes for the day is a way of selecting a mood, a way of approaching the town, and my fellow urbanites.
Style and fashion–the fabrics, cuts, shapes, and the ‘postures’ that come with them are as much archives of urban experience, as any documents down at City Hall. Maybe even more so!
In the movie District B13 (2004), set in future-present Paris 2010, marginalized young people no longer walk. Moving through a grey landscape comprised of the dream-turned-nightmare of urban modernism, they no longer accept pedestrian movement as the natural response of bodies to urban space. Instead they leap frog, bounce of walls, fly through windows. The new bodies are made, by necessity, for time-and-space-defying travel.
I love parties. And I love party flyers. What would a collection of such beautiful, ephemeral things tell us about a city?
Brussels:
Paris:
Tel Aviv:
Vendredi Soir (Friday Night), dir. Claire Denis (2002)
Cinema is a materialization of our psychic life. It makes visibly tangible all psychic phenomena, including the work of memory and the imagination, the capacity for attention, the design of depth and movement, and the mapping of affects.
…Film repeatedly shows that pictures–moving pictures–are the current documents of our histories. Indeed, filmic memories–fragile yet enduring–are fragments of an archival process porously embedded in our path, part of our own shifting geography.
–Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (2007)
On 14 december, 2009, on Stout Street, between Lambton Quay and Ballance Street, in the center of Wellington, New Zealand, there was a pile of rubbish blockading the entire road and making the street impassable for cars, pedestrians and cyclists. This impromptu blockade was a “One Day Sculpture” called Journee des Barricades by British artists, Heather and Ivan Morison. According to the artists’ statement:
Car wrecks, discarded furniture and other urban detritus barricaded a central city street in Wellington, New Zealand on Sunday 14th December 2008.
The temporary public artwork entitled Journée des barricades acts as a rupture in the everyday comings and goings of the city. In its barricade form, the sculpture might suggest associations with the history of political actions and social unrest, but as a collection of discarded consumer products it may also bring to mind questions about our environmental and economic future.
This street art in Wellington looks eerily like the streets of Naples looked last year (though probably not as smelly, and certainly not for the sake of art).
This artists’ collection of urban detritus also reminds me of the work of Walter Benjamin, especially the Arcades Project. Continue reading
