The Landscape Surgeons were recently treated to a wonderful interactive urban-intervention/creative-archive workshop run by Cecilie Sachs-Olsen, entitled Performing the Urban Archive. A new addition to the department, Cecilie completed her PhD at Queen Marys, University of London, under the supervision of David Pinder (Geography) and Jen Harvie (English and Drama). She has published work in Cultural Geographies (also see here for a piece co-authored with Harriet Hawkins) and Performance Research; and is co-founder of an exciting urban performance collective, zURBS, which has run various urban interventions and workshops internationally.
The idea of seeing the city as an archive – to approach it as layer upon layer of compacted material detail that is in endless transformation – has always been of great interest and value to Cecilie as an urban researcher and artist practitioner working in and with urban space.
Cecilie writes… “I believe that this approach may imply a certain way of ‘looking’ that has the potential to challenge pre-determined and fixed understandings of urban space in favour of openness, instability and multiplicity. In turn, it may lead to a re-imagination and new understandings of our material surroundings”.
The idea of ‘performing urban archives’ then, seeks to resolve the binary oppositions that are often created between materiality – I’m here referring to the objects and material entities of urban space – and performance, as bodily practices. Each of these concepts is often seen as unable to encompass the essential traits of the other. For example, whereas the archive implies a form of placedness, givenness and nomination to remain, performance is often seen as being so radically in time that it cannot remain in material traces and therefore disappears.
Similar distinctions are made between practice and representation: In geography, representation has been critiqued for fixing and deadening the liveliness of things, resulting in a turn to new approaches that foreground the performative and practiced. The performative approach here tends to focus on an engagement with space that is oriented around immaterial and human-centred action, and risks neglecting substantial considerations of how social processes are bound up with the constraints of the material qualities of space.
Accordingly, performing urban archives turns the attention to how the ways we think about and inhabit cities are both shaped by and materialized in spatial forms, so that rather than seeing materiality as a fixed entity, it is seen as contingent and inherently performative. The idea of performance destabilizes materiality by making explicit the processes in which (the meaning of) materiality is constantly invented.
“When we know what a door is and what it can do we limit ourselves and the possibilities of the door…” – Anne Bogart (theatre director)
The workshop activity started with an anonymous audio message from the future:
“This is an incoming message from the future. Listen carefully. I repeat, this is a message from the future. Dear people from the past. This message is sent to you by a team of archaeologists from the future.
You will be happy to know that in the future we found the time capsule that you produced today, March 3, 2016. As we understood it, the aim of this time capsule was to give the future an idea of what urban life was like in 2016. The time capsule was mainly filled with objects and some occasional drawings that we guess were an attempt to archive this urban life. But we are confused. The way we understand it in the future, it is people, and not things, that make society. The meaning of an object is determined by the social practices it is part of, and not simply by the object itself. Unfortunately, we have NO idea what these social practices were.
Yes, you might say that this is our job as archaeologists to find out, by digging deep, looking into significant detail, restoring damaged pasts, reading signs in traces of things that have gone before and so on. However, this would require a significant amount of time – and if it is one thing we are short of in the future it is time for substantial research. Luckily, we do have a time machine, so we decided that in order to save time, we would go back in time, just in time to deliver this message before you make the time capsule, so that we can give you some inputs that may help you make it more substantial.
You will all have been given copies of the original map that we found in the time capsule. This map indicates where the things in the time capsule were found. Inside the map you will find our interpretations of the things found in these places. Now, we would ask you to go to these places – as many as you can – and find similar or completely other objects and add notes, drawings, stories and other additions that you find relevant in order to give us a substantial idea of the present: how urban life is, what your experiences of the city is, how the city works, what is important, what is not important and so on.
You’ve got one hour out in the city to do this. Then you will come back here and present what you found and we will see if it will make a valid contribution to the time capsule.
Good luck! End of message.”
With this message in our minds we set out in four teams to try to archive the elements of the city described in a handout from the future, complete with a map of the area around Bedford Square and a set of clues and instructions.
We could either collect items from the street; or take photos of things that we could not (practically or legally!) remove. Here are the results – our collective catalogue of the urban environment: our time capsule for the future. (Please click on the images for more details on which items relate to which clues, and explanations, where they have been added in the comments.)
Q2: What you archived from this places is a sheet of paper with black spots printed all over it. Are these the signs of a language that was spoken only in particular places like this? Or is it an attempt to capture an atmosphere that could not be expressed with words but only in signs or sounds? What did the city sound like back then? Was it loud? Quiet? Melodical? Dissonant? Harmonic?
T5: From this site you documented a piece of a living room placed outside. Is this an attempt to make the street more cozy, inhabit the city as a loft? Or is it an attempt to privatize a piece of the street? Was this a way of marking one‘s territory? Who did this street belong to? Or was it the invitation for people to feel at home?
C6: At this place you found a feather, probably trying to tell us that the city did not belong to humans only. We wonder about the other inhabitants now. Was there more than just birds? And how did animals and humans interact and share space? And were there even other creatures than humans and animals?
7V: What you found at this place is now the skeleton of a plant. But why was that an important thing to archive, we wonder. Was nature precious and excluded back then? Or were you scared of nature dying out? Or was it rather meant as a symbol of life, the good life, the path back to nature?
At this place you found a small container or tray. It has a tiny hole in it: So that water can rinse out? Or to peek through it? Or simply to put a string through it and hang it around your neck? But then again, what for? Was it a case to carry and protect a valuable object? Or a gadget to prove your identity, or even provide you with identity? Or a device to find or reach you at all times? A badge you were forced by the regime to carry around? Or did you do that by choice, and if so, why?
K4: At this place you found a tool to keep distance – or to get in contact? Where are the lines of the intimate sphere? And what is allowed in the public? Who is welcome, who is dismissed, who is touched and who is untouchable?
8L: At this place you found a piece of wire that might have been used for making contacts and connections. Was it removed from somewhere? What does it leave disconnected? Does it suggest a carelessness towards important infrastructure? What was this infrastructure? And what infrastructures became redundant at that time? Or who would destroy them for what reasons?
3C: At this place you found a half round object: A trace of the global trade? A sign for the abundance of fuel to transport things on large distances? A sign of post-imperial guilt or just a positive memory from a place more exotic than this one?
5F: At this place you found some sort of medical instrument. Is this a trace of death in the city? Or is it traces of a mobile rst-aid station? Why would you need medical equipment here? Are there imminent life threats nearby?
3X: What you collected at this place is a necklace. It gives us religious associations, but which ones? Or are you pointing to a diversity of religions and belief systems? And if so, how did these manifest in the city?
C6: At this place you found a feather, probably trying to tell us that the city did not belong to humans only. We wonder about the other inhabitants now. Was there more than just birds? And how did animals and humans interact and share space? And were there even other creatures than humans and animals?
2D: At this place you documented a drawing of an ornamented skull. What does it tell us? Is it some kind of death cult, celebrating the ephemerality of life? How present was death in the city? In what ways was death and ephemerality materialized in the urban environment? Were people afraid of death or was death seen just as a transition to another life? And was this other life a world of order and structure, or a world of chaos, of forbidden joy, or of crime where morals are low and glasses are deep? Is that death-world there to support the life-world, or to undermine it subversively?
8L: At this place you found a piece of wire that might have been used for making contacts and connections. Was it removed from somewhere? What does it leave disconnected? Does it suggest a carelessness towards important infrastructure? What was this infrastructure? And what infrastructures became redundant at that time? Or who would destroy them for what reasons?
We’d like to thank Cecilie for a wonderful afternoon, full of opportunities to challenge familiar ways of conceptualising urban materialities and performativity.
Katy and Huw
Following my undergraduate degree at Royal Holloway, I am now studying for the MA as part of the ESRC 1+3 studentship. My general interests are in the geographies of creative workspaces and the work practices of creative labourers. My research aims to investigate the workspaces and careers of DJ’s and MC’s, particularly in the emerging musical genre of grime across the UK.
Landscape Surgery 