- Venue
- Allenheads Contemporary Arts
- Location
- North East England
The further we drive down the winding road from Hexham to Allenheads the further the colour of landscape seems to deepen from ruddy oranges to moody purples. As the road gets steadily bumpier and we lean into impossibly sharp corners, I feel as though we’ve gone too far. But then we keep going. Just as our driver announces we’re ten minutes away, a dark green Jeep rumbles over a blind hill in front of us and, as it passes, we catch a glimpse of a glittering tiara in the front seat.
We are making the journey to Allenheads for the opening of This is the Future – the latest project curated, facilitated and run by Allenheads Contemporary Arts. The project begins with the inaugural exhibition The Allenheads Findings – a forensic documentary of a town on the cusp of discovering the answer to a local murder but whose unexpected twist could have far reaching consequences…
Located in Allenheads Post Office (a locus for the transmission of goods and ideas between the local community and wider society) the show pieces together various, disparate evidence – from artefacts to eyewitness accounts – accumulated by the London based artists Simon Hollington and Kypros Kyprianou. Unlike the traditional orderliness of forensic science, Hollington and Kyprianou collect objects and ideas with the fervency of bowerbirds; from a broken watch and shot gun cartridge found at the scene of the dead man’s body to anachronistic black and white photos which appear to depict a modern man (determined by his raybans and distinctly contemporary haircut) at a 1950s open air convention.
The show begins with a number of diagrams which go some way to illustrate Hollington and Kyprianou’s dense investigatory praxis which spans science, mysticism and historicism. One of these drawings employs an annotated 5-sided impossible shape. One of the corner annotations reads:
“Everything is defined by
its place and sequence in time
The past and the future
become immeasurably more significant
is the logical conclusion
of absolute relativism an oxymoron?
How can we be sure that we will never be sure?”
It is with this elliptical ideology that Hollington and Kyprianou both look back to significant events in the village’s history (specifically the foot and mouth outbreak) and forward to visions of its future, both of which are described vividly by villagers in two documentary videos, as a means for locating this investigation in the cyclical continuum of time.
Next the show goes on to outline “The Theory” accompanied by “The Evidence”. Essentially, what Hollington and Kyprianou advance as one possible theory is that the body of the unknown man – which was discovered deep within Allenheads’ quarantine zone during the 2001 Foot and Mouth crisis – was actually that of a time traveller. This conspiracy theory is compounded by what Hollington and Kyprianou describe in the accompanying exhibition text as the involvement of a shady quasi-governmental body “F.R.O.M.U (Forecasting Observation Research Observation Unit)” in the investigation into, and mystery surrounding, the dead man’s identity. The evidence they supply from the scene of the death, which only serves to heighten and compound the puzzle, includes a miscellaneous shot gun cartridge (said to have been a special new military issue, replaced by a regular hunting shell) and a broken watch of unknown origins.
In one corner of the post office is a small, dark room illuminated only by a couple of red-filter light bulbs and an old black and white Sony Transistor TV. As I squeeze in to the little room a visitor remarks “It feels like a bunker in here”, and it does. The room has the definite look of having been inhabited by an obsessive collector/investigator; every surface is covered with photographs, newspaper clippings, internet printouts, overflowing ash trays and dystopian science fiction (notably J.G. Ballard’s The Disaster Area and Philip K. Dick’s Valis). A significant addition to this melee is a glossy A5 auctioneers catalogue of “late-capitalist era” artefacts. As I scrutinise the 35mm pegged over the sink and the black and white photos in developing trays, the visitor (who commented on the “bunker” like quality of the space) is gleefully reading aloud from this book:
“Golf was a game once considered a sport… where one would hit a ball, walk after it and hit it again and again… This is not to be confused with the popular, skilful Crazy Golf still played today…”
This is funny but also, amongst the anachronisms and predictions of the future, subtly quite profound. Seeing the stuff of our everyday lives (perhaps not golf personally but certainly plastic water bottles, pens and other items) repositioned as outmoded, historical relics questions our own position in relationship to time. Perhaps, I find myself musing, we are all time travellers, moving inexorably from the past into the future? But what future? A future we can predict by looking at our past and affect by our actions in the present?…
The growing sense that time is a cyclical continuum based on mythology, facts, partial facts and fictions presents an interesting counterpoint to the permanent Allenheads Heritage Centre upstairs. This fairly traditional display of large, laminate text panels and sepia photographs outlines the history of a community on the frontier of both the Northumberland wilderness and the industrial revolution. Also screening in this room is a video filmed by Hollington and Kyprianou of local villagers talking about their thoughts and hopes for the future. The opinions expressed by the interviewees vary from the understated and personal fears for their children and grandchildren to opulent predictions of an Orwellian future where humans will be allotted a certain quota of time “and then somebody just presses a switch on ya”.
One of the information panels in the Centre (to the right of Todd Hanson’s astute piece Tectonic Dish) describes the life and innovations of the local polymath Thomas Sopwith MA FRS who “changed the face of the dale”. Sopwith was both a scientist with an expert interest in astronomy but also an inventor and entrepreneur who instigated both the development of important local infrastructure and access to education including schools, libraries, lectures and events. This figure and his affect on the local landscape seemed to resonate with the This is the Future project, both in terms of Hollington and Kyprianou’s multidisciplinary approach to the oxymoron of time travel but also to the projects larger reason for being; of engaging local communities (and wider audiences) in collaboratively reexamining, imagining and building their futures in the present day.
This is the Future continues until 2012. For more information please visit http://www.acart.org.uk/
Iris Aspinall Priest©
