work in progress

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fromGeorge Perec's 'Street' (1974): 'Unitl the whole place becomes strange, strive to picture to yourself, with the greatest possible precision, beneath the network of streets, the tangle of sewers, the lines of the metro, the invisible underground proliferation of conduits (electricity, gas telephone lines, water mains, express letter tubes), without which no life would be possible on the surface'. Photo taken at the London Cans Festival 2008.

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What lies beneath

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i'm intrigued by these 'utility' photos that appear periodically, the signs and symbols that indicate specific locations or actions that none of us really pay any attention to... out of sight, out of mind, much like the shipwreck beneath the water. i'm starting to wonder what kind of space that 'utilities' inhabit, not just the space that they take up under the street, but the space that they take up in our lives, these signs and symbols a kind of anthropological trace of place that takes up very real space in our lives like washing, listening to radio, cooking. i've read 'species of spaces' by perec, which is a rumination of the space that he is inhabiting whilst writing; the space of the page, the bed, the appartment, the world... he's a strange fruit, clumping sets of slightly bizarre words together making his own experience of life, particularly quirky... the index of normal words mixed with slightly more unusual ones at the end of this (relatively) short text a testament of this. how do you view the space of utilities? i often wished that i could be small enough to experience these places/spaces like that of the borrowers or the rescuers, and move through the sewers and pipes of the underground as an explorer of uninhabited lands, just for one day...