..CRAWLING FROM THE WRECKAGE.......

' I regard my work as diaristic ; the city can be read as a palimpsest, of layers of erasure and overwriting . The need to document the transient and ephemeral nature of the city is becoming increasingly urgent as the process of enclosure and privatisation continues apace. ' 

   Laura Oldfield Ford



A book review in the Observer last December introduced me to the work of Laura Oldfield Ford and ' Savage Messiah ' , a catalogue of urban rambles , pamphlets , now collected together in one large tome . The low-tech cut and paste approach sets the tone ; the pencil sketches capture the feral nature of the project based around the decaying edges of London , recording ' no false promises of a brighter , better , more sanitised tomorrow....instead she focuses on areas haunted by an urban dispossessed , which regeneration seeks to concrete over; city wastelands where fortress-like old tower-blocks rise , with their Escher-like walkways and their ' recreational ' open spaces...............

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines palimpsest as ' scraped again ', a term referring to any inscribed surface from which one text has been removed so that the space can be used again for another - and , as Rodolfo Machado notes , some architectural drawings could be regarded as the equivalent of a palimpsest.

As I get deeper into my MA course , of which I must post more on,- I am beginning to understand that my initial premise of investigating and proposing alternative realities for three or four buildings in the centre of Manchester is requiring a lot more thought - and reading - than I initially had envisaged , calling into question the whole concept of 'remodelling' , the understanding of 'memory ' and place . 

Savage Messiah records a different East London , a different Lea Valley to that currently being transformed by the parachuting in of a brand new / shrink wrapped / security patrolled urban experience , a pre-packed landscape for the ' Olympic Experience ' that has no grounding in the area , no sense of memory or place , no sense of belonging , no relationship .........a landscape devoid of content .

The book review is at www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/22/savage-messiah-laura-oldfield-ford-review

and is by Iain Sinclair , himself an investigator of the city in the gaps , the areas that fall through the cracks in the structure and who writes with far greater clarity and insight than I can ..........and the sketches are good, too.