littering the asphalt with auto-biographical artifacts
‘The body in contemporary capitalist society is a site of both social inequality and personal empowerment.’ (Terrence Turner 1980)
As we consume the endless asphalt, searching in vain for new possession, fabrics to cover our flesh, food to generate energy to take on the next concrete stretch, we become the city. Endless scenes merge to colossal symphony, in their wake, we can determine what might be a civilisation. The body in the city becomes a site; of history, identity and construction which we will eventually tire, how do become involved? Laying these possessions down on thick floral carpets in shallow rooms of breeze block. Such architecture which we construct and which construct our selves or notions of self. The two lie in enraptured entanglement with no possible exit strategy from the endless argument. we scatter endless memorials of our presence; littering the asphalt with auto-biographical artifacts which will become a disparate archeology of the scenes we are endlessly rehearsing yet always forgetting the lines, there is no applause, only a photographer who in the early hours makes an archive of the treasured scenes of blissful chaos. Such images now stored on transparent paper in wrought iron safe boxes, to which they discover the key for such passages has been thrown as a pebble into the roaring ocean.
‘The body has thus become one of the main battlegrounds on which the struggle to forge critical perspective adequate to the changing features of contemporary social, political and cultural reality is being fought.’
( Terrence Turner)
The body as it stands, strong, vulnerable, fragile and towering becomes complex metaphor, itself a performance of the daily routines it seeks solace from uncertainty by endless monotonous repetition. The costume of daily life as a weathered suit of rusty armour; “ his shirt has a hole in” the girl whispers on the night bus. But his suit is still a protective realm of self celebration and fragmented remembrance for experiences never shared.
The body cannot be divorced from the social operations and networks which exist as its contextual framework. The body cannot be singular functioning mechanical social product; by means of cultural placement and social integration or exclusion the body articulates its daily patterns and routines by means of immersion and its subsequent acceptance or active resistance to the patterns and formalities which surround it. We impress upon the city preconceived notions of power and structure which we may in turn chose not to question for fear such question could augment the soft cocoons of reality we have chosen to construct. There are clashes, realities collide, we fumble in the darkness, gasping at all loss of understanding as it slides to moments of turmoil, taking time when the light re-emerges to reconstruct the shattered glasses, gluing, with such care and precision, every smashed fragment back to ” the way it should be” nervous impart that the heavy noise of the soldiers boots will return and shatter it all over again. the footsteps are still echoing in the dormant chambers of surrender.
Urban re:passages 