Listening to a podcast of Tate’s 2009 Symposium Urban Encounters: Rethinking Landscape, I heard Susan Trangmar presenting ‘A Play in Time’, a 2-channel video installation shot in a public park in Hove. Trangmar explains how, in this and in other projects, she has explored relationships between “a phenomenological experience of space, the cultural constitution of place and the lived practices of space, which take place on site”. I found her articulation of these relationships very interesting, and they’ve helped re-frame some of the ideas I’ve been exploring at Culpeper.
Particularly interesting were her thoughts on aspects of ‘public’ and ‘private’ within urban spaces – the idea that community gardens are collectively shared, but also places for the individual to pause and reflect. She talks about the balance between sociality and solitude in parks, ‘where imaginative space mingles with public space’.
I often feel conspicuous when filming and photographing in the garden – laden down with bags and cases, my tripod mounted precariously across narrow footpaths or between benches. Culpeper is quite a contained, compact space, and while it is easy to lose oneself (psychologically, imaginatively) within the seclusion of the bushes and trees, there is little possibility of physically escaping or actually being concealed.
Trangmar talks of embracing the performative aspect of her shooting – making herself clearly visible so that her role as observer is as important in the ‘performance’ of the piece as that of the people around her whose activities the camera is capturing. This led to interesting discussions on the changing relationships between lens and subject in a country where people are almost continually under surveillance – the growing paranoia of a public who are aware of always being watched. Trangmar voices her concern that the increasing privatisation – and so protection and surveillance – of space is affecting our ability to relate or interact with others.
So far I’ve not photographed any of the people I’ve met or passed by in the garden, but I’ve been thinking more about the importance of their presence within my audio recordings, if I am to explore these interrelationships between culture and nature, between sociality and solitude.
I’ve not had an opportunity to visit Culpeper for a few weeks now – I’m eager to find out whether more leaves have fallen, whether the branches are more bare – and, crucially, whether the buildings are becoming more visible around the perimeter fence…
I have done some tests with my Super 8 footage this week though – projecting it into a suspended glass sphere, to see if my ideas about microcosms could be explored in a new ‘bubble’ installation.
