Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

Edgelands, coined by Marion Shoard (2001), are liminal places. Like Marc Augé’s non-places that result from global and capital production, Edgelands are the waste underbelly of this expansion. Ubiquitous, their matrix-like veins are characterized by activities of dog walkers, kite flyers, graffiti, parkour, and risk takers alongside foragers and photographers. Represented as ‘ruin porn,’ melancholic pasts, and the subterranean activities of trespass and vandalism that Bradley Garrett reflects on, Shoard, in a ‘call to arms,’ asked for new value and representation of Edgelands that did not rely on the click of a camera. Yet, it is the mobile phone, GoPro, or body cams with the ability to be in those activities on the move that creates new imaginative encounters. My creative project, ‘blubilds,’ examines inside Edgelands movements, as Tim Ingold (2015) states, to be entangled and part of the lifelines of those that live there. ‘Blubilds’ are the blueprint lifted off the paper, a live score, a dance diagram where movements taken from the bodies that occupy those places become part of the notation of my embodied diagram, akin to Emma Cocker’s et al. movement systems in Choreographic Figures (2017). ‘Blubilds’ are short films, serial and processual photographs that capture the process of intersections rather than single images. This paper concludes that ‘blubilds’ perform intersecting movements between site and artist to construct new liminal fissures and minor gestures through mediated representations to synchronously break past representations and provoke new connections to rethink Edgelands as our inverted city.