The City As An Idea - a reflection on what I'm doing

As the end of the year approaches and I plan and contemplate the body of work ahead I've been, understandably, thinking about what I've done and how it should proceed. I now think I can explain my map and my films in a way I could not have done before, even when I was producing them.

For the first time in a while I listened to the song 'Going to your Funeral' by The Eels, the reprise of which I used in my first film 'To Belfast.'

There is a line in the original song which goes 'Look at all the people with the flowers in their hands. They put the flowers on the box that's holding all the sand that was once you.' It struck me that this has a significance to the last film I made, 'Tomb.' 

The film concludes by suggesting that the attitude that Belfast is in some way dead, or even profoundly damaged, is a total misnomer. Belfast is not a living organism and cannot be dead or even injured. We can use the metaphor to describe our opinions in a poetic and engaging way, but when it comes to honestly trying to get the city working we need to remember they are only metaphorical and ultimately not true. So when E quite unromantically remarks that whatever resides in the box at the funeral is indeed not his loved one but rather a pile of 'sand,' this applies even more readily to a city.

A city is what John Searle would call a social construct (in particular an institutional social construct); if it were not for us grouping the set of phenomena relating to this specific space on earth into a subset which we label Belfast, then Belfast would simply not be. Belfast is a set of ideas, be it the approach to the sandbank ford, the strategic gateway to the Ards, the residence of the Chichester family, the incorporated market town, 'boomtown' of Imperial Victoriana, modernist hub of industry and commerce, religious warzone or 21st century tourism and shopping destination. 

As Alan Moore suggested in 'V for Vendetta,' ideas don't die. Ideas ebb and flow, they contradict and adjust. They defy three dimensional space and fly in the face of logic and rationality. Cities, like ideas, are not things or objects, but are dynamic lived processes which refute absolutism and universality. Any perception we have of an idea dying or not being there is just that; a perception. A perception of the passing of a way-of-being we held dear, or at worst reified. As long as we bear in mind that they are simply ideas which suggest a way of living then their departure should not worry us so much.

Cry onwards to the next 'Belfast!'

Tomb - Notes on a 'Mytho-Geographic' film

The following is a short 'mytho-geographic' film about two distinct and separate locations in the city of Belfast. The locations are not linked, but I never-the-less created a mythic link between them.

Mytho-geography is a technique derived from the art practice of artist Phil Smith as a reaction to the Situationist Internationale's Psychogeography. My own personal take on it is that, where Psychogeography assumes that, through the use of detournement (or distraction), one can decontextualise the city revealing the sociologically objective framework upon which we all build our subjective meanings and interpretations of urban space; Mythogeography is aware of the need to break away from this Cartesian construct and knows that, once the city is decontextualised one needs to recontextualise it. This is done in a surprising way which allows for a deeper reading of the city.

In the film I mythologise myself as a cartographer and urban researcher, casting myself as a film noir detective investigating the death of the city of Belfast. Of course I discover that Belfast was never dead in the first place as time and space are mere constructs and the city actually exists in the lived phenomenological present.

Below are excerpts from my sketchbook which detail my thoughts before during and after the filming of 'Tomb.'