Remnant House - Winter 2023
From here, this city goes one of two ways. Either, it eventually develops into a real city, meaning, somewhere place that is more than hastily thrownup buildings in open paddocks to which people only move because there are wellpaying jobs are here. Or, it collapses into ruin, which seems the more likely longterm trajectory to me.
We won’t all leave when this city goes into decline. We will move to inhabit the vacant buildings, not the ex-government houses and apartment complexes, which were never insulated well enough for anyone live in them other than for a lack of better options. Instead, we will move to inhabit those sprawling brutalist complexes, the art galleries, museums, concert halls, the telecommunications buildings with the thick concrete walls that seem to be on the periphery of every suburb. I have this image of living in the upper room of a tower like this. A small room accessible only to me, holding all the things found in my travels across the continent.
This is a comforting bit of escapism, as if to acknowledge that yes the collapse will happen, but this just means we all return to living in some preindustrial pastoral. Because no, it won’t really be like that if things fall apart. Not when there will be climate wars and refugees, and fires and floods every single year from here on, forever, and the ice melting and sea levels rising and the gulf stream collapsing and fascism and our nation still can’t even begin to reckon with its own foundation in brutal dispossession, so how will we ever return to peacefully living on country, and what can that possibly mean with all the above. All the same, there’ll still be ruins. We’ll still be living in them, getting used to inhabiting them, artfully adapting them to fit our new needs. Possibly we already do, are.
Index
One
Jerry’s Map
I own two that are about A4 in size, collages on a goodweight cartridge paper, bright and colourful, but certainly not precious about their own materiality. I appreciate that, being someone who too often gets precious about the things she uses to make her art. Old maps cut up and rearranged are the dominant element, but so are bright areas of coloured card and direct interventions with pen and marker. An absence is pasted over the top, ostensibly destroying the map underneath, called Void, but in my tiles it is constructed out of lightweight printer paper through which ghostly outlines of the lost terrain are still visible. I can see traces of the glue. Void, structurally speaking, is an additive not subtractive force. Nothing is erased in a collage unless it’s chopped out.
Jerry’s tiles are undergoing continuous revision in a manner that I don’t wholly understand. On the back is a kind of accessioning table listing out the date on which the tile was created, or finalised, its coordinates, where it fits in with all the other tiles and its generation, which seems to assign it to a numbered era in the history of this imaginary terrain.
Two
House Parties
I remember, in the crazier years past, the parties I’d hold in this cramped third floor apartment. This was a strange place. The building itself, a ten-storey tower, had been here for decades, but its use as a residential block only constituted an afterlife of sorts, having spent its heyday hosting commercial offices, or some kind of technological hub. So it was weirdly configured. My apartment, coming through the front door, opened onto a mezzanine looking over the living room and the kitchen, which were downstairs; the bedroom and bathroom, accessible both through the door opposite and from a staircase in the back of the kitchen, also looked down into this sunken area. There were floor to ceiling windows downstairs, plus a balcony which opened off the bedroom. Weirdly configured, awkward to get around in. But it was all mine, and though the practice had fallen off, I had used to host parties here.
The people I routinely hung around with were unemployed, or uni students. I was an unemployed uni student. How did I manage to hold onto the tenancy? The parties themselves were shabby enough affairs, cheap party food, goon and wine, but they invariably lasted until the early hours of the morning, and it was impressive just how many people could pack into the living area and kitchen, which did after all resemble the dance floor at a nightclub, if we turned off all the lights. Miraculously, none of these parties had ever attracted a noise complaint. Possibly the rooms were better insulated than they appeared. Or possibly there was no-one else on this floor, or around me. It was, and still is, rare to encounter other people in the hallways or on the staircase. Maybe the place really had been - has been - abandoned without my realising.
Anyway, those time were past. Now, the living area was taken up by a nice fabric couch on which currently there was a fat furry cat asleep. The windows were clean and big beams of sunlight fell through through the open blinds. Outside, like inside, it was quiet.
Three
Collages and Maps
I tried, initially, to create maps in pen and ink. But the maps didn’t look like maps. They resembled aerial views, landscapes you might glimpse leaning out the basket of a hot air balloon. Even creating them it was difficult to keep things schematic and not get carried away rendering the depth and light and shade, as though they really were imaginary little spaces, and not imaginary representations of imaginary little spaces.
I’m interested in why, switching to collages, they much more readily looked like maps than the pen and ink. One reason might be that there is more of an affinity between collages and maps, than there is between drawing and maps. At least for these kinds of maps, topographic maps, feature maps, tourists’ walking and cycling maps, which superimpose signs and symbols over a two dimensional field of colours, tones and patterns. These maps are something to be read like a book, rather than viewed and inhabited like a painting. I’m not sure if in normal conversation we’d discuss the meaning of a map, unless we were trying to read the map against the grain, to pull out its covert political assumptions and messages, rather than simply what its signs and symbols purported to be about.
Collage can operate in the same way through its mingling of images and text. There is one way in which it can be straightforwardly seen to construct its own internally coherent space (depending on how agreeably its pieces have been arranged). But there is another in which, disaggregated into all its component pieces, there is a dialogue that emerges from their being placed in such close contact with one another. We read into their geneaology, what they might have once been used for and still represent. We roam over them like symbols and fields of colour on a map
Four
Block Party
I went to a huge block party, held in the middle of the night in a crumbling block of flats. Whoever had invited me didn’t show up. The whole place had been thrown open to everyone, but oh wow, it was really falling down. Terraced units leaning on one another. Stairwells led up to the different levels, and corridors led throughout the complex, but their layout suggested more a labyrinth than a place people had lived. Not to mention, the doors were all gone and the rooms had been stripped bare, so the differentiation between interior and exterior was muddled. The whole place was hung with fairy lights, but hung poorly and sparsely. They lit up some areas, and left pools of darkness in others. Different groups seemed comfortable gravitating either towards or away from the light, so on the whole the effect seemed to be surprisingly conducive.
I saw a lot of familiar faces in the crowd, including a few that, actually, I’d rather not have run into. I disentangled myself from them by ducking out for a while to sit in the park opposite, in the shadow of the trees. After a little while, I delved back into the chaos. It was so much more freeing to be on my own here, enjoying everything at my own pace. I’d missed this.
Five
Little Program
Perhaps each map tile can be determined by a set of constraints. Each tile must connect in some manner to the adjacent ones, even if sometimes the connection is more sympathetic than literal, for example, a doorway in one tile and an enclosed balcony in the other, or through an implied relationship of containment. Each tile must incorporate a photo of the territory it purports to map, even if that photo is substantially altered or too blurry and obscure to serve as a landmark. And each tile must incorporate something additional: text, symbols, tiny paintings or sketches.
More on those sympathetic relationships of adjacency and containment. I like that this threatens the two dimensional order of the project. Each tile is ostensibly connected to the others at its left, top, right and bottom edges. A larger map segmented into chunks. But now there may be tiles sitting above or below this plane, or encapsulated within other tiles, or in some way coincident with other tiles but separated in time or possibility and not space. You may, for instance, have to refer to insets, or click away to explore some strange sidechannel bottlegrotto. And navigating the world being represented becomes more complicated and contingent.
So having written all this out, here is a little program or programme for this world:
Each tile is the same size, 512 by 512 pixels.
Each tile must be connected to at least one other tile, through adjacency, through containing, through being contained, but these connections may also be sympathetic rather than strictly literal.
Each tile must contain:
something that incorporates a fragment of the place it purports to represent, a photograph, an artefact, a text extract…
something added in by hand, a field of colour, flowers, signs, structures, symbols, trails…
