As we prepare for a summer walking and recording the second series of Ventures and Adventures in Topography here’s a short video from the studio broadcast of he last episode of series one in December 2009. You can download the podcast of this episode here
Among the suggested topics for series 2 we’re planning one exploring Leytonstone and Wanstead probably following the course of the Filly Brook (or Fillebrook).
Last night I had been filming Bob and Roberta Smith reading from his journals at Tate Britain and decided to walk along Millbank to Westminster to get the tube home. As I reached College Green, outside the the Houses of Parliament I came across the encampment of news crews still trying to untangle the mess of the General Election. It was 8.30pm, and there were only a few teams still broadcasting.
The was a strange feeling of tranquility hanging in the Westminster air, it was all very calm and quiet. Inside nearby rooms men, educated at the most expensive private schools in the country were working out who was going to be in charge. Earlier Bob and Roberta Smith had shown the audience at Tate a postcard from his recent show called ‘I Should Be In Charge’ – his painting of this declaration is on display in the windows of the Hayward Gallery just over the river from Westminster. Bob would make a brilliant Prime Minister
I contemplated whether I should get my camera out and film, and it was then that I recalled the scene in Patrick Keiller’s brilliant film, London, shot on the day after the election of the Conservation government in 1992. I have none of Keiller’s finesse nor a 16mm Bolex but felt I had had a duty to run off a couple of minutes of tape as an homage to Keiller’s opus.
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I recorded this audio of Nick Papadimitriou talking about his practice of Deep Topography last April when in the finishing stages of the editing of The London Perambulator. It’s lain untouched since, a rainy Sunday prompting me to have a tinker with it.
Photo: Aneta Kosmala
Great panel discussion after the screening of the London Perambulator at the Free Word Centre last night in the London International Documentary Festival. Nick Papadimitriou and I were joined by Anna Minton, writer and journalist, author of ‘Ground Control’; Dr Fran Tonkiss, director of the LSE Cities Programme; Prof. Matthew Gandy, director of the UCL Urban Laboratory; and Patrick Hazard, director of the LIDF.
There seemed to be a consensus amongst the experts on the panel that psychogeography was dead – in part killed off by its adoption by academia (I still, romantically perhaps, cling on to the idea that it has a role to play in our understanding of the built environment as it is experienced). There was also agreement that with Deep Topography, Nick was pursuing a different path altogether with an emphasis on the experience of topography and a non-programmatic approach to exploring the suburban realm (or Stockbroker Belt as I think Nick would prefer to term it).
Laura Jenkinson has written this insightful report of the evening.
The London International Documentary Festival continues till 8th May.
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Made this with my little Sanyo Xacti CG-10. The music is by Neveranthony
I’m posting this report from the Islington Tribune not through some mis-guidedly morbid linking of murder and place but because it was a murder on these streets near where I lived that prompted me to start this blog.
The killing of Sam Fitzgerald took place very close to where I lived when I started writing Islintongue, as did that of Sonny Cracknell back in 2004. This is an area that still retains such precious memories for me but seems blighted by violence – very sad.
Here’s the beginning of the report in the Islington Tribune
Published: 16 April 2010
by CHARLOTTE CHAMBERS
CLOSE groups of teenage friends have been left overcome by grief again in Islington after a young Arsenal supporter was stabbed to death close to his home.
Sam Fitzgerald, 20, died from a knife wound sustained outside the Thornhill Arms pub in Wynford Road, off Caledonian Road, on Wednesday night.
He was well aware of a series of recent violent deaths in the borough with friends telling yesterday that he knew murder victims Martin Dinnegan, 14, and Ben Kinsella, 16.
Sam was be lieved to have been a former boyfriend of Jessie Wright, the 16-year-old whose death in King’s Cross is a police case now the subject of murder proceedings at the Old Bailey. He led the tribute march to Jessie on his bicycle last month.
In all too familiar scenes for grieving relatives and friends, teenagers gathered together at a growing shrine yesterday (Thursday). Many of the youngsters were in floods of tears and unable to put their emotions into words.
Sam had been watching his team play Tottenham on the television inside the pub and was attacked when he briefly stepped outside. Detectives are keeping an open mind about the motive for the stabbing but are not linking it to football rivalries.
Sam, of Priory Heights in Wynford Road, was rushed to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel but died soon after.
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