[ 02:30 wednesday 24 august – haggerston hall, london ]
between working on my projects and partying i’ve rather neglected the cycle of processing and uploading photos and films. previously the backlog held fairly steady at three months but now it has swollen to a full year. in a couple of days i’ll be fleeing the frenzies of london and heading south to stromboli for a bit. the impending trip has shamed me into editing my film from last september’s visit to the island.
i already uploaded some pictures from the trip back in april.
[ 22:31 friday 25 february – haggerston road, london ]
last march i spent a few sublime spring days in cornwall. the sky was clear, the air soft and filled with birdsong, the hedgerows bursting with fresh shoots and blossom. i made a small pilgrimage to madron well near penzance where i’d been just once before, more than a decade ago. one feels a sense of magic there. it’s easy to understand why so many people have considered it blessed through the centuries. here’s the film i shot.
here’s a short film from one of the social nights at the new krankenhouse squat, which i wrote about in my previous post. this was towards the end of march when the occupation was at its peak. the shift to a new location and the sheer magnitude of the space unleashed a wave of exuberant optimism and creativity in stark contrast to the grim factional bickering of the group’s final months in the old building. i hope a little of that positivity and excitement comes through in the film.
the community made great efforts to prepare the space for the night and the result was magical. turning an abandoned twenty-foot river boat into a tilted bar and lounge was a stroke of genius. some friends of the group had brought it round one day saying they needed a big enough space to repair it after which they promptly vanished. apparently it was cheaper to transport it to the warehouse and dump it than to scrap it.
the second huge space was turned into a skate and bike park for the night. you can glimpse some of the crazy re-engineered bikes which are created in the community. most of them are fiendishly difficult to ride.
watching the film again i cannot help but feel sad knowing it wasn’t destined to last. within a month the building had been repossessed and everyone had moved on. but in the squatting community i get the sense that the most beautiful things are often fleeting.
back in february bertrand and i attended scrapclub, an occasional party where guests are offered the opportunity to destroy domestic appliances, laboratory equipment, furniture and a variety of other merchandise with sledge-hammers and steel bars. the event operated on the following cycle: the organisers laid out a selection of items, pulled the names of a dozen guests out of a hat, provided these guests with goggles and hard hats, gave the cue for them to set about destroying the objects, swept up the debris once it had all been smashed to smithereens, then started laying out a new selection of objects. all the while there were djs playing noise music. it was rather exhilarating.
[ 23:42 monday 1 february – haggerston road, london ]
here’s a film of my journey to the los roques atoll, eighty miles off the caribbean coast of venezuela. it covers the journey to find matias on his coral islet, the omnipresent easterly wind, pop art hermit crabs, adrien’s friends on the yacht and on every side the cerulean sea.
[ 17:26 friday 25 december – sandhurst, gloucestershire ]
christmas day, perched afront the log fire in mum and dad’s sitting room. this afternoon we went out walking in the forest of dean. everything was crusted in snow. a deep, timeless silence hung amongst the trees disturbed only by the crunch of our feet on the icy ground. the river wye was in full flood, winding around the limestone cliffs of symonds yat and churning tirelessly over the shallows. the sun hung low above the horizon and sent fingers of gold piercing the mist between the boughs. we got lost and ended up walking rather further than we intended. it was breathtakingly beautiful. i took photographs with a sense of wide-eyed wonder.
for christmas day i’ve made a little film of the procession i stumbled across in palermo at the end of september, celebrating the feast of the madonna delle mercede. it was a magnificently rowdy affair with two large marching bands, a dozen boys pulling the giant statue of the madonna and shouting fervent invocations to her, then at the climax the most intense firework display i’ve ever encountered. it felt as if we were under artillery bombardment. even the palermitans around me stopped gossiping for a moment and looked slightly nervously at the flaming projectiles darting on all sides.
anyway happy christmas to all who read this and i hope you enjoy the film.
here’s a 6 minute film edited from the footage i recorded on stromboli at the end of september. the weather in sicily that month was rather savage. there were flash floods across the island. cars were submerged in trapani. hill-side houses collapsed in a mudslide in the suburbs of messina. i reached stromboli on the final boat before communications were cut off by a fast-rising scirocco. four days later i departed in the face of another scirocco. the crews running the siremar hydrofoils between milazzo and the eolian islands are courageous men. it seems to me they love their work most when it’s stormy.
the video is recorded in high definition. to view it at a larger size, right-click anywhere on the video and select “watch on you tube” from the menu.
// charles armstrong // 