fri 17 nov
The day starts with song. Neighbour Max in singing Bread and Roses – a song he’s loved for a long time. So much so he’s getting a tattoo of ‘bread and roses’ on his arm. It’s not the first tattoo story we’ve heard on this journey into Bread and Roses - it means a lot to a lot of people. Max’s dog Marx noses the camera, intrigued by our musical morning activities. Orwell also had a dog called Marx.
I rummage through the shed digging out the work I need for tomorrow. I have been invited by friend and kaleidoscopic light in this life, Anna Hart of AIR to occupy the ‘Valley Room.’ Tucked away on an industrial estate in Enfield there is a map of this whole valley of the River Lea – from where it meets the River Thames to beyond London’s orbital M25 - through Waltham Cross to its source in the Chlltern Hills north of Luton. There are pins and notes - marking what has happened here from official histories to unofficial stories, and specifically, artworks in response to this place. My invitation is to find and reflect on where I made marks and delved deep into this valley of multiple sites and stories.
My focus has been the Lower Lea Valley. The place Dan and I first made a life and home together in former factories turned breeze block studios. A place of industrial revolution and invention and more recently massive whole-sale redevelopment as part of the London 2012 Olympic project. I find packets of photographs, excavate folders of archaeological documents, sketchpads, ephemera and works in progress. I revisit films made –finding DVDs of the guerrilla Olympics we staged in a cold February of 2007 before fences divided the valley. Everything is damp, needing archival care but surviving anyway…..1000s of photographs of a place no longer there. An alternative archive of voices silenced and sites erased by large scale regeneration. The map of the land is a map of displacement. The motivations for what became obsessive production of so much work in the area between 2005 and 2014 a need to counter erasure - to collect and tell and share other stories than that of this place as a blank and empty canvas for the dreams of the mega-event and the sanctioned wish fulfilment narratives of predatory developers.
Narratives have the power to destroy. To raze places to the ground. The sites that hold our stories, our culture and histories become sites of vulnerability and conquest. Writer Alex Shams warns ‘Pay attention to what Israel destroys in Gaza - historic mosques, ancient churches, community centres, bookstores, government buildings, archives - and how it kidnaps Palestinian writers, journalists, and poets.” These are not collateral damage –these are targeted attacks on Palestinian history and existence.
And this is not new. The film ‘The Great Book Robbery: chronicles of a cultural destruction’ explores the looting of 70,000 Palestinian books by the newly formed State of Israel in 1948. In 2014 poet and founding member of Gaza Poetry Society Mohammed Moussa “woke up to the news on May 18. That morning, at 5:50am – the crack of dawn – the bookstore had been hit by an Israeli missile. My memory filled with the faces of friends I’d been there with, with the titles and covers of the books I’d read or bought from there. Our books were burning, our memories too. Our most vital places were being wiped out.” Shams references a book ‘The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world’ by Antony Loewenstein and the story of Ariel Sharon’s obsession with capturing the archives of the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organisation) Research Centre during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon (Israel was later forced to return the archive as part of a 1983 prisoner exchange). “There were no guns at the PLO research centre, no ammunition and no fighters. But there was something more dangerous” – books, records and land deeds, photographs, historical archives and critically, maps. This archive is described as an Ark.
Archive. Artworks. Artefacts. Defiant evidence of existence.
Film maker Saeed Taji Farouky tweets: “I've always thought one reason the IDF stole the Palestinian film archive in 1982 was not only to erase our visual and narrative history, but because these films describe the fundamentals of the Palestinian struggle with such nuance and clarity.” And although the Palestinian Cinema Institute Archive was lost, the search for and reconnection with this censored celluloid history is itself a story of resilience and resistance – an act of witnessing and a refusal of the abandonment of collective memory. Many lost films were rediscovered through tracing networks and salvaging scattered copies of these shared stories made with shrapnel damaged cameras and searched for in graveyards. Testimonies of trauma and tenacity.
https://www.frieze.com/article/find-story-grain-dust-search-palestines-lost-cinema
Back to a damp shed and the encroaching dust and decay. I remember too late that this whole installation is based around boxes and discover a specialist supplier just off the North circular with a cardboard box in every dimension for every occasion. Anna helps me up the stairs to the studio amid meat packing businesses, laundry firms and car repairs. She has been doing her own archive research and is mildly obsessed with cucumbers. She shares a cut out newspaper article from 1924 featuring a woman harvesting massive vegetables and asks me to guess how many cucumbers were produced in the Lea Valley glasshouses in that year. I am wildly wrong. It is 50 million. We talk Lea Valley and market gardening. I tell her my grandfather worked in this industry. I have a photograph of him standing in braces amid rows of tomatoes - an image itself turned green with age and alchemy. He grew carnations in peace time and tomatoes in war. ‘Flowers under Siege’ is the title of a report referencing Gaza’s withering floral industry. Flowers. Siege. Words that damage the other.
Glasshouse. Bomb.
Blossom. tank.
Olive tree. Bullet.
