Helen Armstrong led a group of artists, academics, musicians and architects through Sydney's disregarded interstices as part of the Liquid Cities symposium. I was lucky enough to be in her group, and carrying a disposable camera. The images are here and are annotated below.
Alley flowers
Is it a roadside memorial to an accident victim, or the drunken discarding of an unwanted admirer's gift? I've spent the last five years documenting roadside memorials around Australia (the sequence is called War Graves and will ideally be completed and shown in 2008) but this one, in a tight alley where you'd be hard pressed to get up a lethal head of speed, seems utterly implausible.
Divided property
These alleys are like lift shafts, with knives of direct sun momentarily warming the asphalt floor each day. We were lucky enough to pass through this one as the sun hit ground. The hostility of the property sign's assertion echoes the inhospitability of the environment.
Just like watching
...grass grow. Why is the camera trained on that particular plant? What do the security guards think it is up to? Where is the room where a monitor displays that bush? Who watches it? How many hours of footage have been recorded of it growing with agonized slowness in the dim reflected daylight?
Well greased
Another bottom-of-the-well alley contains the most hostile sign yet, and this one non-verbal: the sharpened spikes on this fence have been liberally coated in axle grease for happy accidents and fast insertions. Nasty.
Proto-Goodwin
What does this corrugated iron externality contain? Stairs? Balconies? Why was it built, and when? After a functional dissonance in the brick structure had been uncovered by usage, or during the initial planning? It reminded me of Richard Goodwin's metal extrusions on buildings, which is apt as he was leading one of the other groups.
Backpack
We theorised that this windowless structure was solid, just brick and concrete post-and-lintel cells all the way through like a giant Lego toy. Equally, the church could be carrying it - like the sign says - as a backpack. Supplies for the afterlife. Tent, swag, billy, maybe some sausages. Churches are the sherpas of heaven, and this one is right next to an entire district of mountaineering suppliers.
Main earth stake in pit below
Buggered if I know. It was there. What the sign says, whatever that means. Something about vampires presumably.
Shake the eye's hand
The third planet is sure that they're being watched
by an eye in the sky that can't be stopped
and when you get to the promised land
you're gonna shake the eye's hand
Your heart felt good
it was dripping pitch and made of wood
Your hands and knees
felt cold and wet on the grass beneath
(Modest Mouse)
Shattered
Reverse vertigo. Glass ceiling giving way. You could fall right off the planet it's spinning so fast. Check your suction cups.
Kay Orchison
9 Octoberber 2007