Linked to ghosts

[imomus]

Walks, ghostly voices, the spirit of place, radio, memory, art, road protest. It's all wrapped up in Graeme Miller's work. You can hear three of his pieces on BBC Radio 3's Thinking Earth page, or visit a Flash piece based around out-takes from Linked.



A description of the project: "Stretching across from Hackney Marshes to Redbridge, the M11 Link Road was completed in 1999 after the demolition of 400 houses amid dramatic and passionate protest. Now artist Graeme Miller has filled the empty spaces these buildings once occupied with a treasure trail of sound celebrating a century of everyday moments in East End life. Concealed along the three-mile route, 20 transmitters continually broadcast hidden voices, recorded testimonies and rekindled memories of those who once lived and worked where the motorway now runs."

My friend Xavier Gautier (he's Anne Laplantine's... well, husband, now) is showing his Family Films at Galerie Alain Gutharc, 47 Rue de Lappe, Paris 75011. Like Graeme Miller, Xavier is concerned with evoking memories, but what Xavier does is to splice sequences from memorable or moving Hollywood films with Super 8 home movies his parents shot in the 70s. The result is a kind of "epic memory" in which life and media intermingle. You can see examples here.



My spies at the Frieze Art Fair in London (and the zingier Zoo show next door, literally in Regent's Park Zoo) send me word that the Caetano Veloso album before Araça Azul is being featured in a display by Peruvian artist Armando Andrade Tudela. Transa sounds like a dismal, dead-end album, possibly a compilation for the Anglo market (more than half the songs are in English). But I like the sleeve, and the title of the last track: "Nostalgia (that's what rock'n'roll is all about)".

Comments

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

I woke up this morning thinking about ghosts. Last night I found a recent video of an old friend (http://www.clarku.edu/offices/mediaservices/videoarchive/playvideo.cfm?id=36) on the internet. I hadn't seen him for thirty years. I knew he had become important so there was a danger that he might have turned into an asshole. I was relieved to find he was still the same person, still had the same spirit. Though it was a balding spirit.

I find ghosts in buildings. They don't find me I have to go looking for them by smashing the walls, which is how I make a living. There are old newspapers in the walls and letters that fell between the cracks long ago like the one from the little boy at summer camp who wrote "Please mother, send me another nickle so I can buy an apple from the huckster. There the sweetest apples I ever had." From a time before the Golden Gate Bridge when it was a big deal to go to summer camp in Marin.

Mostly I find the ghosts of the carpenters who went before me. Like pictures they drew and old lunch bags stuck between the rafters with empty half pint whisky bottles. Once, after tearing out a plaster and lath cieling, I noticed that all the x bracing hadn't been nailed off. The carpenter cut them all and tacked them in place with nails started in every piece but not hammered in. I suppose the apprentice would have followed behind to finish the job but the lathers got to it first. Although I was happy with my place in the space time continuum of finishing a task that began in 1898 I could'nt help being a little annoyed with the lazy bastard ghosts. Wood gets harder with age. I had to drop the romantic pretense and the hammer and use a nail gun.

Thanks for the links. Great stuff. It made me think - I'm going to take a video during construction and leave a dvd in the wall. The ghosts of the future will be so much more articulate.