I’ve had a few people ask me why the videos that I posted on the 20th June are currently offline. They were films about imaginary suicide jumps and were the product of my stay at The Vacuum Cleaner’s residency Ship of Fools; a project about art and mental health. We filmed them by throwing camera phones out of the windows of his tower block in Hackney and slowing down the footage that this generated.
On the 16th July somebody committed suicide by jumping from the 11th floor of the same tower block. It was a total shock to both of us and especially upsetting for James as he had to witness the aftermath. Out of respect for the deceased and his family and to help ease the trauma that we both felt, we have taken the videos offline for the time being. They currently remain private.
I went round to James’s flat on Saturday, for the first time since it happened. We had a really long conversation about what this series of events means ethically for us as artists making work about suicide and whether we can still take forward our plans to develop the videos. For me it was important to go through a process of defining our motives and clarifying what we would want our work to say to audiences.
James spoke to me about what happened in the immediate aftermath of the jump. He talked about being on the market just outside of his block and hearing people repeatedly asking the question ‘why would you do that?’ Yet we both agreed that the question for us would be ‘why wouldn’t you do that?’ I feel that until we overcome the taboo of suicide to understand that it can be a psychologically hardwired impulse that makes perfect sense to some individuals, we can never have a frank discussion about how to help.
For this reason James and I will keep working together on our jump videos, although we will expand to explore other sites. We probably won’t save any lives by making art (although you never know) but we might just slightly shift somebody’s understanding of the issues. Of course we will also be taking advantage of the morbid curiosity that makes suicide such a compelling subject for viewers and speculators, but nobody’s moral compass is ever perfectly tuned.
