Second site visit to the Oceana today. This is one of the locations that Rednile had a Factory Night event a while back, and I put in a proposal for a project to take place there as a result of that. It’s essentially a business park on a site which was previously a marine research facility from around 1945 – 1985. There’s a mixture of buildings, some renovated and let as offices, others which still have wallpaper from the 80s covering up some rather beautiful 50s architecture. All this is intertwined with the rise and decline of shipbuilding in the UK and the North East, which has some pertinence given the current economic situation.
My original proposal involved making a video from archival visual documentation of the site, and interweaving this with contemporary images of the site. I was also being rather hopeful in that somewhere there’d be some old audio footage which I could intersperse with new recordings. It was therefore very useful to go back again, not least because as a result I’ve got a much clearer idea of what archival material – or indeed lack of it – is available to use. At first I was thinking this might be a real problem, but it could actually be quite interesting – our understanding of the past is informed by what documentation we have access to, so by there being a considerable gap, the whole subjectivity of what’s left is brought into question.
This is one of about three projects that are in this slight limbo stage – preliminary research and fundraising before anything concrete can be said to be happening. The other thing that all these projects-in-limbo currently have is my desire to collaborate with other people on them. Again, this wasn’t in the original proposal, but certainly looking around the site today, there’s so much to use, so many possibilities, that I think working with another artist, discussing ideas and approaches to create a work would be a really exciting way of tackling it.
