Go East

On Wednesday night I volunteered at the “How To Make A Cinema Float, Play Time Talk and Screening Event” at The White Building in Hackney Wick. The event heralded the beginning of the Floating Cinema 2012 and recapped on the success of last years project, which was developed in conjunction with Up Projects. Emma Underhill, Director and Curator of Up Projects, gave some statistics in an introductory speech; it is estimated that last summer this participatory art project reached approximately 5,000 people directly and over 80,000 indirectly. The project is centered around East London and can be seen as part of a bigger project to celebrate the eccentricity of both London’s waterways and the side of London that holds the Olympic Park in the build up to the games.

The wonderful artists Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie spoke of their creative practice, Somewhere, and stressed their principles of almost never working with “suggested” avenues, firms or people. Rather their aim is for an organic process of art and artistic development in conjunction with community. This approach is exemplified by their developing friendship with other houseboaters during the 2011 Floating Cinema project, which lead to such events as members of the houseboating community showcasing films during the project or providing sandwiches from their own café-barge.

Also shown on Wednesday was Michael Smith’s Drift Street, which showcased at last years Floating Cinema season. Having just watched London by Patrick Keiller the parallels were apparent. The differences however, were that in Keiller’s film the narrator explains Robinson’s wanderings to us in clipped prose whilst Michael is himself the pyschogeographer who transcribes his adventure around the East End in the manner of a beautiful poem. Both the narrators adopt a seemingly bored tone however and to me, this seems to suggest that although London has all its delights and frights, George Simmel’s polemic of a blasé attitude here comes to fruition.  A case that is maybe highlighted in London by Keiller’s quotation of Alexander Herzen’s memoirs:

“There is no town in the world which is more adapted to training one away from people and training one in to solitude than London; the manner of life, the distances, the climate, the very multitude of the population in which personality vanishes, all this together with the absence of continental diversions conduces to the same effect…”

Nevertheless Smith points out that Hackney and East London are something to be celebrated, as something hidden, eccentric, dark and yet with a its own vital community. There is one point in Drift Street where the narrator comments that Hackney reminds him of Shoreditch – at least, before people like him turned up in Shoreditch. In Hackney Wick on Wednesday night, in the midst of an industrial estate, barren and run down, there was an event, which highlighted the joie de vivre of the area – the mystery of the canals and waterways and their community. Amongst the brick and signposts the estate is littered with art galleries and performance spaces. People with city hybrid bikes, thick-rimmed glasses and converse sneakers were already crawling out of the woodworks. Simply, it was very very… edgy. And from the bridge at Hackney Wick station I could see the edge of the Olympic Park with that Frankenstein of art, engineering and capitalism; the Olympic Orbital. Looking like a tornado that will bring developers, high street shops and chain restaurants in its wake, an Eiffel Tower on LSD, the work is surely a sign of things to come. So quick explore the east before it becomes simply another part of what Herzen termed this “fearful ant heap.”