The London Dereliction Walk: Boundaries

I’m developing work around the London Dereliction Walk, and one of the themes i’m exploring is that of boundaries, so today i’m using this as a working space to build out the idea.

The London Dereliction Walk is a sequel to the New York Dereliction Walk, work that centred around the Highline in Manhattan, and which considered social ideas, dominant narratives, and organisations, that had fallen derelict and been reborn through social movements.

This new work considers three themes: ‘Boundaries’, ‘Voice’, and ‘Shadows’. The first is about intersections and edges, and how things are held separate, or bleed across the gaps. The second is about voices we are given, or claim, and how voices are amplified, subverted, silenced, or evolve. The final part considers how shadows and traces remain as things transform or are repurposed.

Boundaries can be held in different systems and spaces: in the city we can see boundaries of height, from the archaeology buried beneath our feet, to the penthouses high above. We see relationships between space and power, and the varied mechanisms and aspects of control, as well as the enforcement of such. Doors, fences, barriers, cameras, and a range of security guards from the state sanctioned police to the private bouncers and street marshals.

We see credentials held formally in badges and uniforms, as well as socially in rituals, costume, artefacts, and also behaviour. Some cultures layer one on top of the other, existing in parallel, squatting upon each other, or sometimes invisible.

Boundaries may be ideological, or commercial. We can be held apart simply because we feel apart, or because a fence, or cost, holds us so. Housing can separate us as well as shelter us.

Boundaries are formed through different materials: the opaque or translucent, the rigid or flexible. Some boundaries bend, whilst others hold firm or shatter.

Time itself may be a boundary: the old to the new, the idea to the execution, the potential to the reality. The erosion of time, and the patience of it.