No trespassing

A while back I made a short film called Event Horizon, about London’s North & South Circular. In order to gain access to one of the opening views I had to trespass,  which is something I’ve had to do from time to time to be able to photograph some of the industrial forms and structures in my previous post.

Having occasionally had to make the conscious decision to go where I’m not supposed to has perhaps unsurprisingly inspired an interest in urban explorers such as Bradley Garrett, whom I’ve quoted in my draft paper. In Explore Everything: Place-hacking the City (2014) he discusses 1950s social revolutionary Debord’s claim that the modern world ‘rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted’ together with geographer Nigel Thrift’s that the city is now ‘a mixture of control through surveillance and distraction through entertainment’. Garrett states that urban explorers help to countermand this through trespass and reporting back to the public with blogs, photos and videos, ‘bringing the hidden to the fore’.

Mattson happened to send me a link to a piece from thisamericanlife.org in which host Ira Glass interviews the anonymous publisher of Infiltration, the zine about going places you’re not supposed to go. This is a brief extract from their conversation which I think ties in well with some of the things I’ve been contemplating in relation to Obstructions, notably that people generally prefer to stay ‘on path’ and learn to ‘perceive walls that aren’t there’.

This is my film Event Horizon: