Output details

City Dell, Leeds Light Night.

City Dell was a directorial collaboration with Stephen Burke in which we aimed to place multiple cities in a small park, in a city, unfolding durationally over a five-hour period. The paper buildings of A Wonderful Engine heavily influenced it, but these were realised in actual landscape and in a larger, less fragile scale. The site was Queen Square – a small park surrounded by railings in a square of Georgian houses. The work was commissioned by Light Night with Leeds Met Gallery and Studio Theatre.

The work took inspiration from Calvino’s 'Invisible Cities' (1997), but further considered change and movement as a constant and opposite phenomenon to the notion of settlement; our settlers were neon-suited dancers that were tethered by bungee cord to various points around the small square park. They worked with a ‘kit’ of internally lit model buildings, working their way into the centre, stretching the chords, to build cities, to take down cities, to reconfigure environments. In this work, as a further development of previous works in real and represented landscape, I wanted to place the audience both within and without, to objectify and subjectify synchronously placing my map of a city within a park within the actual city that loomed, lit for LightNight, all around: the outside inside the outside. As an extension to two previous works, this employed travel as a meditation upon occupation and belonging, deploying the practice to navigate the sensibilities of emic and etic positions, telescoping scales, alternating between the representational and the actual rather like the choices we now face on Google Maps between the photographic and the cartographic. All of the works have cartography in common, either as a necessary logistical tool in the planning and execution of large-scale walks or as an aesthetic ground for discussing distance. Between the exploration of an outsider status, multi-perspectival ethnography driven by mobility, ideology concerned with stasis and the architectonics of waypoints, of memorialised objects, of embodiment, these pieces certainly contain a crisis of representation between the subjective and objective modes of production and discourse that gestures to the inability to both visualise my Self, or indeed to realise my Self as Other. If these perspectives are concerned with representation, they also concern the relative space between the physical and the meta-physical that requires an act of representational translation that we call mapping.The work was commended for its visual aesthetic and attracted over 2500 audience members throughout the five hours of its performance.