Flachau 'Melt' Proposal.
We are the FMR Group, a research artist partnership set up by Gudrun Filipska and William Filipski McDonald. We make visual and auditory works primarily responding to industrial landscape—both in ruins and active—and the transient tenor of their spatial culture. In 2010 we made a film of a walk around the slag heaps of Liege, Belgium, the Terrills Walk (please see link to clip) and we would like to reprise this work's visual and auditory enquiries into post-industrial landscapes with an examination of the remains of the industrial in sites around Flachau.
If selected, we will travel to Flachau in August, early September to film a series of walks around its abandoned mining sites before the first snows. The raw material of our work will be video and auditory footage recorded by walking bodies: subject to our bodies' rhythms, jolts and sensitive to their haptics. The final work will be a film, for projection, that seeks to consider the different historical and contemporary trajectories trodden across Flachau's industrial, post-industrial and leisure landscapes.
The premise of Melt corresponds to the theories of ruin, decay and the social histories of industrial degeneration which guide our practice. One of our principal interests in the geographies that we examine, such as Flachau, is the role of the heritage and tourism industries: how their spectacle might arrest, alter, distort narratives of the melting away of all that was once solid of an industrial heritage. Our work seeks to figure the remnants of this heritage as a disappearing spectral subject—in that sense problematised by Derrida—or as a minor trace, to borrow from Deleuze, that offers critique and counterpoint for the awe and grand spectacles of the industrial sublime. In the way that Simmel's ruin is one subject to natural decay rather than standing for permanence, the temporality of Melt's premise suggests partial, deteriorating and ecological perspectives on this industrial legacy and these are the images we hope to realise.
The act of walking for us, serves as exploratory and performative of this minor and spectral ruinscape. Our work will document the details on which intersections between tourism, pleasure and past mining culture are made and so it will have as the grounds for its enquiries the pathways once worn into the landscapes of Flacau by miners and now overlaid by tourist and sports cultures. In order to document these intersections we use an array of visual technologies, customising and combining obsolescent and new systems, editing together analogue and digital footage to develop technique, as a journeyman worker might, out of the union of what is brought to and available in a new territory. That this incorporates the vulnerability of old media and puts it in a dialectic with what is new and viable speaks to Melt's interests in the mutability of Flachau's geographies.
This is a proposal for a work in progress.
I am making a series of films in the Fenland village of Fordham in which I live, (begun in Summer 2016) dealing with ideas of territory, mapping and boundaries called 'Beating the Bounds- a film in four parts'. Each film takes a section of the local territory as its subject and creates a subtle and very personal mapping of the land through a series of walks.As this work is so specific to the locality and the territory in which it is made, I would be very excited to bring it to a very different context, the______would be a very useful space in which to think about the project at this juncture in its conception and an essential space in which to begin a dialogue with visitors to the gallery about the themes of landscape and territory which it addresses. The project looks specifically at spaces of Fenland which have been preserved in their natural state, flat boggy marsh-land, representing a very different landscape both aesthetically and culturally to that surrounding the ______.I find these contrasts exciting and I think this will bring a very interesting angle to the work.As well a screening the films which have been completed so far, I will be present in the space, live editing the footage for the next films and engaging with members of the public as I do this. I will be working with raw audio footage, which I will be playing in the space as I work, I plan to have slide projections-running on a carousel and digital projections of photographs film stills and written notes- creating a diagetic dialogue between supporting and archive material which will feed into the development of the films. This will be an extension of my working studio practice but one with which I would like gallery visitors to be able to fully engage and observe.As well as being engaged in live editing, I will be working on the planning and development for the final film in the series (to be shot in Summer 2017) which will be a document of a collective walk to be undertaken by myself and members of the village community- a traditional 'Beating the Bounds' ceremony led by the Parish Priest, taking its route from old documents and word of mouth accounts about where the boundaries of the village lie. I will be working with these archive materials, church records and audio accounts and would like to open up a dialogue about spacial walking practices 'deep mapping' and alternative forms of cartography in relation to the theme of the 'beating the bounds' ceremony. I will deliver an artists talk about this project, its themes, and walking as artistic practice as well as having archive materials displayed for audiences to read and handle, the feed back from which will I am sure be exciting material which will bleed into and inform the final stages of my project.I would also consider the five days at the _______ to be a 'performance' of a research process which I would also document as a film.