Squint Opera, St Paul's
Gustave Doré, 1872, The New Zealander
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Memories of the Future
Squint Opera's recent project, Flooded London, is showing as part of the London Festival of Architecture. Amongst the images sent to me was one which sent shivers down my spine, a wormhole between the centuries, echoing Gustave Doré's engraving of The New Zealander, from 1872. Squint Opera's figure is about to dive off the ledge of St Paul's Whispering Gallery, into an interior flooded by rising sea levels. While Doré's New Zealander is outside, in both time and space, sketching the ruins of St Paul's. The images destabilise conceptions of permanence, and offer instead the frisson of history rubbing up against the imagination, a fantastic frottage.
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2 comments:
Jolly interesting. Thanks for bringing my attention to this. There's a quite nice little video thing in the Guardian today about the "flooded London" show. Might be of interest: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/interactive/2008/jun/30/architecture
Hope all is well.
Thanks for the link Dylan, have just watched it and particularly enjoyed the piece on the Thames towards the end, a kind of melting into the marshes as the inevitable post-everything moment...
Enjoyed your Spanish piece - very surreal and otherworldly, had an aura of a crime novel, a sense of the imminence of something, of a lurking presence.
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