There are two main presentations for this month’s meetup.

First, a presentation on the first Crossing Lines Group Project for 2012: Memorial:

Memorial – If one considers non-places in terms of the ignored place, the nothing-place, the vacuum, and then considers memorials as meaningful, significant places, then we have an opposition. It would be a challenge to photograph the meaningful in the city. Memorial is a good word, and of course applies to much more than statues of men on horses.

- Who decides where meaning lies?
- Who decides how it is represented?
- Must memorial be collective and public?
- Can it be private and personal? Is this a source of tension?
- Must memorial be physical? Must it be permanent?
- To what extent must a memorial be a place?

Nick Scammell quotes from Annette Kuhn‘s ‘Remembrance‘:

“The struggle is now, the past is made in the present.

Memories evoked by a photo do not simply spring out of the image itself, but are generated in an intertext of discourses that shift between past and present, spectator and image,  and between all these and cultural contexts, historical moments. In all this, the image figures largely as a trace, a clue: necessary, but not sufficient, to the act of meaning-making; always signalling somewhere else….What happens, then, if we take absences, silences, as evidence?”

The photograph as a type of memorial in and of itself.

Alex Macilniney has begun working with sound and will be showing new images and playing audio field recordings of Canary Wharf as part of his ongoing project on financial districts.

As a complement to Alex’s presentation John Levett will introduce recordings from Michelangelo Antonioni: Trilogy And Epilogue a recent project inspired by four of Antonioni’s films and including works by Marc Behrens, Olivia Block, Jason Kahn & Steinbruchel.

Please mail me if you’d like to book a slot for the February meetup. [john.levett@gmail.com]

As always, please consider the Crossing Lines meetup as an opportunity to float an new idea that you feel doesn’t fit into the customary outlets; anything that might promote a collaboration; anything arising from previous meetups that has edged towards fresh insights or simply new questions.

A one or two sentence summary that I can use in the mailout & on the CUCR site would be appreciated.

All contributions carry equal appreciation. If you’re unsure whether anything will fit the format of the evening then it’s possibly the sort of idea that will!

We will shortly be starting a fresh group project derived from the discussion docs that Michael Rodgers & Nick Scammell presented at the end of 2011.

Nick has prepared the following intro to the Project which will kick-off in February:

Memorial – If one considers non-places in terms of the ignored place, the nothing-place, the vacuum, and then considers memorials as meaningful, significant places, then we have an opposition. It would be a challenge to photograph the meaningful in the city. Memorial is a good word, and of course applies to much more than statues of men on horses.

- Who decides where meaning lies?
- Who decides how it is represented?
- Must memorial be collective and public?
- Can it be private and personal? Is this a source of tension?
- Must memorial be physical? Must it be permanent?
- To what extent must a memorial be a place?

We have the room booked from 5 p.m. so if anyone wants to come along for an informal pre-meet then please mail me.

The full programme for the evening will be published next week.

This meetup is close on the heels of The Long Lay Off so … if it just this moment strikes you that there’s an idea that would suit a reasonably open agenda then please mail me & we’ll find space for you.

Meanwhile, these are the confirmed presentations for this session.

Len Salem attended the CUCR Symposium City to Sea earlier this year and then took part in the workshops (day trips to the seaside) that followed.

The result was London’s Seasides – Aspects of Regeneration. Seasides as The New Urbanism—get in at the beginning!

Ganda Key will be another first-time presenter on the evening. Having taught art & design, Ganda writes: “I got into photography via a printmaking degree & started building table top sets, constructed photographs & worked with a few poems by Jorge Luis Borges.” Ganda has been documenting the history of Kings Cross, Battlebridge, Archway; creating images based upon entertainment around Holloway; making inspired by Ed Ruscha; exhibiting in Slovenia, Berlin & Bristol.

Judith Jones asks “Who is The Poundbury Flaneur?” My dictionary describes such as ‘an idler or lounger’. Surely not! More follows

John Levett will outline initial thoughts on Cultural Exchange & Exchange Value following the ‘exchange’ with Nick Scammell in December.

These are the confirmed presentations for this session.

David Killeen makes a welcome return to Crossing Lines to present a documentary piece focusing on security booth structures and the individuals who work within what David describes as ‘these banal generic structures; bizarre when coupled with their surroundings’

Carol Kenna will be presenting work from over forty years of engagement with Woolwich. Carol writes: “As a child it was the centre of my universe, an elegant town, a garrison town. My days were punctuated with performances by the Royal Artillery band at the Granada cinema with its Wurlitzer organ that rose and sank out the orchestra pit, afternoon tea in the Co-operative restaurant or Lyons Corner House – the longest, most narrow restaurant in London. I was captivated by the never ending reflections in the concave steel book-ends of Southern Electricity’s display window and journeys on Woolwich Ferry with glimpses of the brass pistons that drove it across the river.”

Nick Scammell writes: “If a picture is a silent poem, then a poem is a speaking picture. But when does poem become photo? When to write and when to click? These bare bone poems seek to evoke or suggest photos that could have been taken. In the rush to photograph, perhaps some are best untaken? Or best ‘taken’ by words. I continue to explore the ways in which memory is kept, visually and verbally.”

Michael Rodgers will share work by Wim Wenders and Victor Burgin to complement Nick’s presentation.

Alex McIlniney‘s has booked a ‘tentative’ slot to present field recordings from Canary Wharf which complement the text images of last month’s meetup.

John Levett will perform an act of cultural exchange.

Michael & Nick will be briefly taking responses to the 2011-2012 programme distributed at the November meetup.

It’s a very full programme. Hope you’ll be able to make it along for the meetup after which Nick will be leading interested parties to the nearest pub for whatever transpires.

Going Forward 2011_response

The curator of the Crossing Lines Autumn exhibition, Johannes Rigal, has published a fine essay derived from his detour of the completed work. Here are his reflections available for download in .pdf format:

Who is crossing the line?

Please note change of room for this year to NAB 3.26

There are three confirmed presentations for this session.

Anita Strasser is going to show her most recent work on people facing potential redundancy. She has recorded what people have to say about what it’s like to be in a situation like that, and has photographed them as they were speaking. This work also brings into question the meaning of the workplace. Anita is familiar to us from her work on The Deptford High Street Project but her current work represents new departures.

Christian von Wissel writes: “Archaeology of Error: Working with negatives allows incorporating the possibility of error, that things can go wrong. It forces you to deal – at its best it permits you to play – with the fact that you don’t have total control over the image. I like coming back from a journey and not knowing what I have brought with me. It makes you appraise the time implied in the process of seeing (it can also be horribly frustrating, of course). Things not only can go out of hand, they also always simply go on while images capture but the memory of moments gone by. So how much time lies between a field-trip and its development? Spanish: its ‘revelation’ – in the laboratory? How could this time be put to work as a method?”

John Levett will be presenting reflections from recent work in Hull and the Humber Estuary and questions how much of his work is documentation and how much projected wishful memory. Issues of communality, the pastoral, the cultural conservative, refractory nostalgia and the films of Terence Davies are touched upon.

A reminder: the Crossing Lines Annual opens at Linear House Gallery on 10th October with the PV on Thursday 13th from 6pm onwards.

Before then, hope you can make it along to next week’s Crossing Lines.

Google Group here: http://groups.google.com/group/crossing_lines

Contact: john.levett1@gmail.com

Initial Thoughts & Write Up
Looking for a theme

Starting from my own point of view, I want to show a series of urban landscapes that I have taken as early as April 2011 throughout London. This series is concerned with questions of how tourist sites can be seen and considered differently once abstracted and emptied of tourists/people on the one hand and the actual sites on the other.

What remains? What can be seen & perceived in those abstracted places? Is it possible to experience those “stripped” places? If so, what are differences to the – oftentimes – stereotypical views of those sites? What happens to a place loaded with historical but also economical, political and cultural meaning when we experience a different sense of this place? Ultimately, can´t these places be considered as true “non-places” as their contemporary importance is only formed through the buildings situated there and through the tourist who is travelling to a city like London just to see them because of a constructed image of memory/history/power that is transported in tourist guides?

St. Pauls

Buckingham Palace

With this short description, I want to propose 4 possible approaches to the exhibition:

:: A “Best of”- Compilation Show of work done within the last 12 months concerned with everything urban. This would be a rather broad approach and depending on the actual submitted work could either be themed as exactly that or a more specific theme could be found with a thread connecting the work on a more specific level to form a consistent body of work by all the participants.

:: An “Urban Landscape” Show, the “urban landscape” being defined as generally rather open once again to give the participants the opportunity to show work in different forms.

:: A “Rethinking/Reconsidering the Urban” show: At the moment, two things are looming over London as a city and urban space. First, the Olympic Games that are coming closer and closer. A couple of weeks ago I took a late train into London and got off at Stratford International which at that point was – and most possible still is – a strange, ghostly, surreal site. It was dark, it was raining, which ultimately led to me experiencing the site as a kind of gated construct situated within but at the same time out of London. This particular experience – of a place in the middle of nowhere, no people in sight except for a group of security guards standing around the fences, borders between a public nothing space and a private nothing space – made me once again think about the use of the city and its spaces. That there currently exists an area that is completely disconnected from the actual city but at the same time has a huge significance for the city – which will even increase in a year´s time – could, if it not already has, lead to questions of the importance of certain sites within the city; and to a reapproach to questions about the relationship between the public and the private within the urban environment of London. The political and social importance of this discussion can also be seen in the second thing still looming over London, the riots happening in early August 2011. These riots led me to reconsider not only political questions about policy and governance in London but also to once again reconsider the urban space, and the private and public. That public places should be sites of political demonstrations, etc cannot – in my opinion – be denied. They have to be places for the daily and everyday struggles for power in political, social and cultural terms.

But with the riots – without going deeper into a discussion of politics, police actions and the differences and connections between acts of crime and acts of resistance or struggle – and the “march” by rightwing nationalist groups last weekend in East London, there has to be a rethinking of the urban and a reconsideration of questions of security, safety and ownership of the city (if we also consider the formation of “protection groups” in the aftermath of the rioting and looting). I am currently still trying to make artistic and personal sense of what happened in working on a project with CCTV footage and concerned with the places most affected by the events of the last month. These two things should in my opinion be at least put up for a discussion within the Crossing Lines group, in a creative way. My “London sites” project mentioned initially could be seen also from this perspective.

:: The 4th approach should be open for discussion at the meeting on Wednesday, 7th September.

General Thoughts
:: Of course, any suggestions made by the group for the Exhibition will and have to be considered. What I have proposed above should be seen as initial suggestions for the Exhibition. Nothing is written in stone, everything can be discussed

:: The work shown at the exhibition should be as varied and diverse, yet stringent, as seen at the E&C show which in my opinion lived and was successful because of a wide variety of methods and works of art. Where possible, installations, photography, video, photo-montages, paintings etc… should definitely be included in this upcoming show.

:: In terms of requirements by the group, I would ask that the participants get back to me (at j.rigal@gmx.at) ASAP with their possible themes and project titles that they want to show, to give me the time to consider all possibilities.

:: Submission date for the work to be put up at the exhibition should be no later than October 7th (I will send out an email with exact date and time) – assuming that we can do the hanging of the work on the weekend before the opening.

Please note change of room for this year to NAB 3.26

There are two confirmed presentations for this session; both offer plentiful scope for extended discussion.

Nick Scammell writes: “I am working on a proposal for a solo show focused on memory and taking in abandonment and retrieval, loss and surprise, damage and repair, imperfection and resonance. In order to achieve this, I have been exposing images to somewhat unconventional post-production techniques (fire, water, snails, writing), as well as attaching them to found objects. I’m interested in getting some feedback on the degree to which this work succeeds (or otherwise), as well as thoughts on alternative/unusual methods of display.”

Jennifer Roberts will be bringing a speculative idea for open discussion. She writes: “Words like disjuncture, collision, fringe, keep coming up, within a European context. It’s only so far two or three images, which weren’t planned as a series. I’d really like to see if this is just a connection I am imagining or if it’s evident to others as well.”

There have been a number of creative responses to the call for ideas regarding the future trajectory of Crossing Lines & how we might function over the next year or two. There will be space to pursue discussion of these during the evening.

A reminder: the Crossing Lines Annual is coming up in October (10th to 23rd). I’ll be calling-out for provisional commitments shortly.

Before then, hope you can make it along to next week’s Crossing Lines.

Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/crossing_lines

Contact: john.levett1@gmail.com