For those wanting to help after the devastating earthquake here in Christchurch on 22nd February 2011, donations are very much needed, and the government has set up an international appeal: Christchurch Earthquake Appeal
"Once we give up the belief that our life-world is rooted in the ground, we may thus come to a point where ungroundedness is no longer experienced as existential anxiety and despair but as a freedom and lightness that finally allows us to move." John Rajchman (1998) Constructions
What next for Christchurch ... how does a city bounce back after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake (and its attendant multitude of aftershocks... now numbering 4,170)?
Exploring uncanny landscape ... the Freudian looping of the Heimlich and the Unheimlich ... roaming the garden ... time for new adventures. First, a mental field trip (owing to the limitation of funds), to the Pitzhanger Manor-House in Ealing, West London. Designed by John Soane in 1800, and reverberating with a suitable presence, the manor is home to the PM Gallery, currently hosting The Witching Hour: Darkness and the Architectural Uncanny.
Here are images that cast us in to the twilight zone of marginal spaces, liminal times. Places of palpable poignancy, latent terror, suffused with sinister seething .... double takes, absences, surreality. Channelling Magritte, limning Hopper-esque moments, communing with Bill Henson ...
Revelation, Invention, Speculation, Provocation, Textual Pleasures, Landscape, Architecture, Art: all of the above lightly sauteed and consumed with a fine red...