Lisbon / 2013

(re)adjusted territories … Trafalgar, etc began with choreographed surveys on the western edge of Europe onshore from the sea area known as Trafalgar (latitude 38, longitude 9).

Language and history connect this territory with South America, Africa and Asia. Huge upheavals of fortune are mirrored by its rugged terrain … power, wealth, earthquake, flood, fire and survival

From the shore the empty horizon stretches as far as the eye can see. Beyond are mountains, and beyond the mountains, Spain.The in-between is like a huge anchored ship, maintained through creative resourcefulness and resilience.

Over time the crew changes, technologies shift, etiquettes adjust, ideas are imported and exported, novelty finds accommodation with tradition, the familiar intersects the extraordinary … perpetual adjustment at all scales.

Marseilles / 2012

(re)adjusted territories : Marseilles, etc began with a series of  choreographed surveys within the city of Marseilles, and its extended view to the horizon.  Situated on rugged terrain around a harbour and docks, Marseilles faces the Mediterranean in earthy fashion, turning its back on the mainland beyond the hills. For centuries its existence has involved the sea and the peoples sailing it. Marseilles has absorbed many races and cultures, blurring origins or accommodating difference. Trade and technology, fortune and fashion, ideas and influences fluctuate like the weather … precipitating endless adjustments, leaving countless traces.

26 centuries ago, people lived on this coast and left pictures of their world on the walls of caves now submerged beneath the waves. How hugely circumstances have changed since then, during nearly 10 million days of deliberate and accidental modification.

Seven hills and seven seas, ferries to the fort and across the bay, sea views and rocky edges, fish markets and fish soup, weather fronts and shipping forecasts are embedded in everyday life.

Could a connoisseurship of rain unify a survey of the famous/beautiful and the marginal/overlooked … an oblique strategy to view the expected and the unexpected, and to discover fresh opportunities to respond to? Collecting and curating rain, etc … like butterfly catchers.

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Madrid / 2011

(re)adjusted territories : Madrid, etc began with choreographed surveys in and around Madrid. A city described as ‘baffling’ … it’s location a royal decision in 1561 to fix the seat of government at the geometric centre of the Iberian Peninsula, and the Spanish empire. Perched on an arid escarpment overlooking a plain, it is Europe’s highest capital city and has expanded to be one of its largest. Roads and railway lines radiate from Madrid confirming its strategy of positioning.

Madrid’s complex topography is countered by the artifice of flatness … platforms at all scales on which the rituals of everyday life can secure a reliable purchase … squares, terraces, rooms, pools, bridges, cellars, tables … datum points defining the co-ordinates of occupation.

All distances in Spain are measured from the stone slab in the Puerto del Sol known as Kilometric Zero.

How might we observe and respond to the circumstance of Madrid and its underlying surface … what fresh initiatives and oblique logics might be applied here … as critical interventions … or moves of radical delicacy … ?

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Napoli / 2010

(re)adjusted territories : aberrant conditions, Napoli etc …

Three hundred years ago Napoli was the southernmost end point of a Grand Tour of France and Italy undertaken by the wealthy and educated English aristocracy chasing the origins of western civilisation.

Missing from the itinerary and the Grand Tourists’ documentation is the in-between … the untidy, non-conforming reality of one of Europe’s most densely populated cities. A city of dark reputation … considered unfathomable and twisted even before the Camorra … always culturally on the edge of Europe … established in a volcanic landscape by the sea that is simultaneously terrible and benign … volatile, unpredictable, fertile, strategically desirable, hot and strange … where ‘aberrant conditions’ are the norm.

Napoli has lived with the fact of instability for centuries. It is undeniably layered, unstable, entangled, contradictory … an accumulation of violent disruption, of ordinary contingencies and accommodations, of exquisite aspirations and extremes of making-do.

Cyprus / 2009

2009 (re)adjusted territories : double take(s), cyprus

We began with choreographed surveys in and beyond Nicosia, oscillating between North and South Cyprus across the ‘green line’.

Since 1974 the political act of partition has been manifest as a hastily erected and expedient physical partition a soldier’s sketch constructed at 1:1 scale.

For older generations the memory of a complete island and a complete city are contradicted by this barrier, while younger people have only experienced one or other half as if the whole. Two realities have developed back to back, separated and joined by the third space of the UN patrolled buffer zone.

The current potential for re-unification seems an optimistic moment and also a tangle of riddles and contrary perceptions engraved in a territory that was once one.

We imagined from afar the recent opening of border crossing points doubling the space like a hall of distorting mirrors … exposing similarities, differences, paradoxes and slippages.

Twenty people attempted a survey in October 2008 conceived as an island-sized choreography hinged on the crossing points.

The project intends a fresh way of seeing to match a fresh circumstance setting out to observe whatever presents itself equally interested in the famous, the beautiful, the ordinary and the mundane. The deliberate viewing of both sides of the line anticipates a harvest of double-takes prompting a miscellany of questions that might be re-phrased as speculations.