Paperweight Radio

 

A couple of weeks back I returned to ResonanceFM to feature as a guest on the pilot broadcast of Paperweight’s radio show. I had originally written a short piece for Paperweight: A Newspaper of Visual and Material Culture, a couple of years back when they ran a themed issue on ghosts. For a number of reasons that was the last issue of Paperweight to be printed before the editors moved online. Anyway, it seems that the publication is due for a comeback with the next issue being put together for later this year and as well as their online presence, the journal has now moved onto the airwaves.

The pilot show hosted by Juliette Kristensen, also themed on ghosts, featured an interesting line up of guests and covered quite a broad reading of ghosts and the occult. Paul Atkinson, Professor of Design at Sheffield Hallam, spoke on the topic of vapourware – technological innovations that are designed, prototyped and marketed to the public but never manufactured or sold, leaving a design history littered with objects made present only by their absence. Brad Feuerhelm introduced his work on Paraphotography, speaking to a number of occult themes and introducing his current collection, On Paraphotography: Uncertainty, the Occult and the Uncanny. showing at Harlan B. Levey Projects, Brussels. The show concluded with an interview with Ninteenth Century Literature and Culture scholar, Clare Pettitt, on ‘The Nineteenth Century Telegraphic Imaginary’. Somewhere in between these guests I answered some questions on the strand of spectral based geography I am working on for my thesis, what I have termed, the parageographical.

A recording of the show can be found here.

Modern Witchcraft @ the ACS Gallery

I had the pleasure of visiting this beautifully curated exhibition at the ACS Gallery in Southwark last Saturday. Some truly engaging pieces by John Stark and James Hopkins as well as uncanny additions from the Lovett Collection provided by the Cumings Muesum. It is worth the trip just to see the black mirrors. Keep an eye out for the

Modern Witchcraft runs from the 23rd March through 18th May and can be found at ACS Studios/Gallery, 128 Blackfriars Rd, London, SE1 8EQ.

Uncanny Landscapes Programme

Uncanny Landscapes: An Exhibition

Ghost Frequency

Last week, Jennifer Kerrison of ResonanceFM and BBC4 invited me to take part in a 30 minute panel discussion show named ‘Group Therapy’ broadcast live from ResonanceFM’s studios in Borough, London. The show is premised upon three guests responding to a listener’s real life dilemma and this week’s topic was the paranormal. Having never done any radio work before I jumped at the chance, and I have to say that even though I cannot and probably never will be able to play the recording back to myself, it was a great experience and I had the chance to engage with some genuine, friendly and interesting people in one of my favorite areas of discussion: ghosts. Please check out the other guests of the show, the hilarious ‘comedy human’ Jessica Fostekew and psychologist Jarrod Carbourne. The experience reiterated the importance of creating a brand or public identity for yourself when trying to disseminate research to a wider audience and given both the difficulty of securing an academic position in today’s job market and the wider move towards audience outreach, opportunities like this are not to be missed. I also saw the value of Twitter, at long last, and created an account to coincide with any further broadcasting or public engagement work I may get to do in the future. Follow me here.

You can listen to the show here and read Simon Watt‘s guest blog entry on the paranormal to accompany the show, here.

The spectral aquascape of Rainham Marshes: A photographic essay.

It’s been a while since my last post, predominantly this has been down to time constraints; chapter deadlines, conference organization, a house move, my job etc etc. But it has also been down to not knowing what to say, or rather how to say it. See, the subject of this entry has been with me for a few weeks now but I couldn’t make my mind up as to how it should be presented, In general I am not a huge fan of photographic essays. A number of works in this vein seem to posit, quite weakly, images as a substitute for text. I didn’t want to produce a tepid interpretation of an engagement with a truly beautiful site. But I also didn’t want to give a huge textual regurgitation from my thesis on the hows and whys of the hauntological and these barges. In any case I have decided that the images are strong enough, maybe not in composition but definitely in content, to speak for themselves with minimum introduction.

And so herein begins my first photographic essay, a visual exploration of London’s urban peripheries and an abandoned fleet of concrete barges that rest there. I include a short introduction.

The site is fairly easily accessible (with a car) and if you have the time it is worth waiting for the tidal movements of the Thames to change so that you see the barges both concealed and revealed by the acrid waters of London’s aqua arterial route. The marshes and the the barges are around a 15 mile drive east of London city centre.

Rainham Marshes lay nestled between London’s Dagenham Dock to the east, and Purfleet to the west,  and make up an expansive area of waterside wilderness protected by the RSPB. The barges themselves rest upon a small area of mudflats which is temporarily revealed by the Thames throughout the day. On our arrival, the tide was in and only the tops of a couple or more of the barge hulls could be spotted; grey, brutalist and in keeping with the stark industrial complex of Erith that lay on the opposite embankment of the nature reserve. As the waters shrank away a whole platoon of skeletal concrete remains were revealed, the history of which is equally as ambiguous and spectral as the boats’ strange visual presence. The concrete barges are, according to the local authority’s heritage signage, survivors of the D-Day landing, however there appears to be little evidence of this. Alternative explanations for the boats’ existence have included suppliers of drinking water and or oil to larger sea faring vessels both during and after WWII. The ambiguity surrounding the barges history augments their curious existence and makes for a site of rather bizarre character. It is not merely the cyclical and phantasmagorical revealing and veiling of these objects that makes the place seem so bizarre, but rather a process whereby the occulted history, strange proximity to natural and industrial landscapes and the aesthetic of the very material these barges are constructed from, that leads to a sense that this place is ‘uncanny’, that it is of an almost ghostly quality. Nothing really fits. Nothing makes sense. Why were the barges abandoned here? What was/is their purpose? What happened to the people that built them, sailed them and ultimately abandoned them?The site is strange but it is inviting regardless. The landscape the barges are set upon and within appears unwelcoming, the marshes to the east of the City are perhaps not the most secure or surveilled area of the capital, however they are unquestionably worth a visit. It is a truly hauntological landscape- the solidity of the remains that exist there invite a questioning of the remains that lay absent.

If hauntology can be used to describe the infidelity of the material landscape – it regularly blurs and distorts our sense of history, allows for absences to manifest as presences- then aquascapes like this site might be seen to amplify the process; the movement of water reiterates the rippling of time, moreover it provides us with an smooth and distorted surface. A surface which both reflects the present world and which allows a vision beyond or within it. To perceive the landscape as haunted is to see through the surface, to refuse infatuation with the ‘now’ and to understand the power of a past that can permeate, prevail and preclude a sense of an unshakeable present. Rainham’s concrete barges do this, they do so by existing semi visible and without fixed context. They problematise and question our thinking of the spatial and its temporality. It is perhaps both their hints of a working history in the narrative of war, and of their place within an imagined habitus, that allows the spectral occupants of the marshes to haunt the landscape they dwell upon. It is perhaps the reason that a the barges appear so dislocated, odd considering their anchored nature.  I don’t want to say anymore about the site, other than it has to be experienced first hand. The rest is down to the photographs and the barges themselves.

Another call, another conference.

Call for Papers: Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference 2013

Occult Geographies: (im)material agents and the geographical imagination

London, 28-30 August 2013

Sponsored by the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG).

Organisers
Julian Holloway (Manchester Metropolitan University)
James Thurgill (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Over the last decade geography has turned its attention to engaging with those elements of place that remain unseen and to exploring the relationality between materiality, agency and the invisible as affect or spectrality.

This session seeks to explore the way that place not just affects us, but stirs, moves, disturbs, confuses and distorts our perception. In particular, the session focuses on the occult and occluded facets of various geographies. Here the occult pertains to that which is hidden or obscured from our perception but potentially not to that which is unknowable. The occult provides a way in which to enframe those uncanny aspects of place such as unseen agency, strange naturalisms, magic, ecologies of the spectral, and positions them within esoteric practice. As such, the occult as a movement represents a history of practice that seeks to work with and manipulate the invisible and unseen aspects of place; the occult in its various manifestations therefore signifies an often ignored, yet deliberately hidden, frontier in geographical practice.

The session invites papers that deal with occult and esoteric geographical imaginations and spatial practices. Furthermore, we seek papers that highlight new occult directions for the geographic imagination and explore how the occult can potentially be used to redefine the world around us. Therefore, we seek papers that both analyse occult movements and their geographies, and papers that aim to deal with the occult as an exploratory method in the study and development of geographic thinking that have the potential to reconfigure our understanding of place, materiality and agency.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

* Geomancy and arcane cartographics
* Magick and the esoteric manipulation of space and place
* Ambiguous materialites and their spaces
* UnNatural agents
* Occult movements and their geographies (Rosicrucian, Speculative Freemasonry, The Golden Dawn, The Illuminati, Hermeticism, Chaos Magick, etc.)
* Haunted and ghostly landscapes.
* Placing the occult
* Geopolitics and the occult
* Occult prophecies and apocalypticism
* Conspiracy culture and the ‘hidden control’ of geography.
* Popular culture and commodifying the occult imaginary (from Dan Brown to ghost tourism)

Please send abstracts (c.300 words) to both session organisers James Thurgill (James.Thurgill.2009@live.rhul.ac.uk) and Julian Holloway (J.J.Holloway@mmu.ac.uk)
by Monday 4th February 2013.

For the Royal Geographical Society Conference page, click HERE