September 2011
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Take me on this walk again
Shuruq Harb
What is inscribed in a name? Whether it is a name of a person that you can’t get out of your head, or the quirky name of an important file that you hope you won’t forget.
I don’t know when and how my fixation with names started. It must have been before ‘Bill’ had become an obsession of mine.
Initially I experienced Bill Drummond much like a rumour or a myth through my friend, artist Leah Gordon. Bill came up in one of our conversations as we walked along River Thames. She told me the story of Bill burning a million pounds as part of the art duo K Foundation in 1994. It sounded so Rock & Roll! Like Mick Jagger, Axel Rose or Kurt Cobain destroying their guitars on stage.
For years Bill had written his name on the London A-Z and walked its path. He neither documented these walks nor kept the A-Z maps baring his NAME. As a kind of homage (or counter homage) Leah sets out to walk the outline of “Bill” on the streets of Stockholm.
I grew up in Ramallah and until recently (at least officially) the streets had no names. In 1010, Ramallah city Municipality realized an ambitious project that entailed renaming and numbering all the city streets. “All The Names” was my response to this change. Listing 210 streets named after different individuals, the signacts as both an index and a portrait of the city.
“Al Jahith”, “Shakespeare”, “Picasso”, “Naji Ali", “Patrice Lumumba”
Are now also places that I can go.
Ramallah is not the only city that has named an avenue after the first elected Congolese president Patrice Lumumba. South African photographer Guy Tillim spent some time chasing after Lumumba’s ghost across central and southern African countries. In her essay ‘On Street Names and 'De Facto Monuments', Leora Maltz-Leca reads the recurring image of the road in Tillim’s series as ‘a motif for picturing history’. For the act of renaming is both, an erasure of the past and a manifestation of utopian aspirations for the future.
Yet we often navigate these streets absent mindedly, drifting and searching for connections to other places. As we walk, we Like, Share and Tag. In “Landscape of Codes” Katrina Sluis examines the continuously blurring line between our city landscape and the “World Wide Web”. The web is no longer a place to go to, but another layer of life, she states. It is this unseen layer that Barney Kulok’s “InVisible Cities” tries to capture as he creates a portrait of New York through its most ephemeral coordinates, namely its Wifi networks.[1]
So ‘Take me on this walk again’, we may venture onto another conversation.
Footnotes
[1] Jared Killeen, ‘Barney Kuluk’s Invisible Cities’, Dossier Journal Online, Sept, 2009.
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Walking a 'Bill'
By Leah Gordon
I was hoping that this particular spell, of a 'BILL' drawn on the streets of Old Town in Stockholm, would bring me a little magic and lead me to some secret signs that I could steal away. As a magician one must prepare the conditions within which magic can best happen, and this is where ritual and ceremony begin. In art, as in religion, one has to make the conditions for magic more conducive. Bill Drummond's (and Richard Long's) walks are rituals to let magic pass through the membrane.
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InVisible Cities
By Barney Kulok
"In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades' curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past." Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
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Landscapes of Code
By Katrina Sluis
As the city begins to resemble the web, tagging and other technologies of inscription hold the promise that we can append the physical world with digital signposts, producing new territories and subjectivities which might destabilise older established cartographies. When our locations determine our encounter with data, the key question becomes; whose memories, which variables, what keywords will direct us?
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Avenue Patrice Lumumba
By Guy Tillim
In many African cities, there are streets, avenues and squares named after Patrice Lumumba, the first elected President of Congo after it gained its independence from Belgium in 1960. My photographs of these streets and avenues are not collapsed histories of post-colonial African states or a meditation on aspects of late-modernist colonial structures, but a walk through avenues of dreams.
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On Street Names and 'De Facto Monuments': Guy Tillim’s Avenue Patrice Lumumba
By Leora Maltz-Leca
As Tillim finds and refinds Lumumba’s ghost in the thoroughfares named for him, his photographic essay ‘Avenue Patrice Lumumba’ draws together these dispersed avenues into a spectral cartography of liberation, uniting a network of scattered locales through their identification with this iconic figure. Such an imaginary cartography – a route linked by a name – highlights how naming, as Paul Carter has eloquently argued, is bound up with the writing of the landscape into history.
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All The Names
By Shuruq Harb
As a group of individual names dispersed across the city, street names make up an eclectic registry. With repetitive utterances and regular use, they are entrenched in the everyday. Names of once iconic figures become mere references to our personal memories & associations.
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