daniel belasco rogers
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These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Twenty years ago I stepped off a National Express coach in Nottingham for the first of many times. For the next three years I lived in the city as a student: formative years that ended in 1989 when I returned to London. Years, in which I fell in love, broke bones, broke laws, lost friends and found most of my physical limits.
In 2003 I was due to return to Nottingham with my first solo touring piece, Unfallen, for which I overlay the locations of three accidents that happened to me in London in 1974, 1984 and 1994, over wherever I perform the piece. This performance never took place. Unfallen has subsequently been invited to Frankfurt, Helsinki, Gent, Perth and Sydney but never back to Nottingham.
It is not just the events that took place in London where I was born and grew up that I carry around… in 1986 for instance my friend John Gullen broke my nose in a safety demonstration in the Waverley building in Nottingham. These stories these moments, these scars, are carried around in my body and my memory and bind me to those locations wherever I go.
For all these reasons I returned to Nottingham and put my forty year-old body through the streets I walked as a twenty year-old. To discover, chart and reveal those events and accidents that have remained in my body and in my memory. To chart a personal cartography of association, event and impression that has gone to form my own biography.
These fragments... took the form of two projected images running from two synchronised DVDs. The looped piece took as long as the walk from 363 Radford Road (my first student flat) to the Waverley Building (my college) and was based on a binaural recording of the walk. For much of the duration of the piece, both screens are blank and the walk is present in audio alone. Occasionally, text would loom out of the blank screen, teasing the spectator with descriptions of Nottingham and Berlin. At nodal points in the journey, the sound would stop and the projections would suddenly show both cities, shot from equivalent locations, starting in the North and taking one minute to complete a 360 degree rotation.
The journey was performed twice, once in the streets of Nottingham, twenty years after having walked them last and an equivalent walk was worked out in Berlin where my forty year old body now resides, using the same principles as overlaying cities in Unfallen. This resulted in a walk through Moabit, down under the platforms of the new Hauptbahnhof and ending on the banks of the Spree. When projected, the images and descriptions on the left were of Nottingham and those on the right of Berlin.
Two photographs of locations in both towns with the GPS track of the journey were also exhibitied. These fragments I have shored against my ruins was a Future Factory commission at the Bonington Gallery in Nottingham, UK.
