On Friday, here on the riverside at Putney, they started setting up the outside broadcast cameras for the Boat Race, the annual jamboree when Putney gets to be briefly seen on screens around the world. A strange object appeared looming up over my house.
At the bottom of this long, pitted and dusty road in Athens is the Eleonas refugee camp, located in a run down industrial estate. This is my only picture because we weren’t allowed to film or take photos inside the camp, which currently houses around 1600 refugees from many different countries, but mainly Afghanistan and Syria. More are expected.
Here’s the video of the Q&A after the DocHouse screening of ‘Secret City’ at the Riverside last May
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/68041329#[/vimeo]
Maastricht provided a suitably quiet setting for an international workshop on ‘Soundscapes of the urban past’, which covered the behaviour of audition across different forms — radio, film, theatre, plus new audio phenomena like car stereos and audio museum guides — from a range of perspectives, including social history, history of technology, sociology, music, media and cultural studies, etc. The idea, with Karin Bijsterveld at the helm, was to bring together a group of about a dozen people to discuss the drafts for a volume of essays to be published next year. Read more
Having made a film about Detroit a few years ago (Detroit: Ruin of a City), my attention is periodically caught by items about the Motor City, like this, over at One Way Street:
There’s probably no more emblematic set of images for this time of economic and ecological disaster than James D. Griffioen’s series of photographs, “Feral Houses.” The term “feral house” is perfect. Griffioen’s photographs, taken in and around Detroit, show the true, surrealist face of the American suburb: small plots of domesticated nature that have become neither nature nor culture. Griffioen’s feral houses have no use value, exchange value–no value at all. They’re not even “green” in the ecological sense.
Griffioen photographed only houses; trees grow inside abandoned buildings in downtown Detroit as well. The entire city is turning feral.Detroit once furnished the sinews for the largest capitalist machine in the history of civilization, yet its viability lasted barely a few decades. The city came and went in less than a hundred years. Griffioen captured the city as it disappears.”