Pathways: King's Cross
Video Installation, with D-Fuse
Pathways: King’s Cross is investigating how we remember and imagine a place and how we document change. The project incorporates films, historic photographs and oral history recordings, and combines these with records of the area as it is now.
What we remember is never quite what really was or happened. Just as our mind selectively filters and distorts, history itself is only ever reconstructed from what has been remembered or documented of times past.
King’s Cross through different times, with its diverse architectural settings and social histories, has appeared in many films as a location, where stories that never actually happened have left lasting traces. At the same time, real lives and places have been captured on photographs and in stories. These different layers of memory inform what we know and imagine about the area’s past in various ways.
D-Fuse have documented the process of change in King’s Cross by revisiting locations from films and photographs and recording what can be found there now. The framed documents of the area’s history have been recaptured with the same views in the present-day environment, then superimposed with each other, like a mirror image from a different place in time. Images caught on layers of transparent screens echo through the space and merge at the centre, hinting at the layers of history that have been unearthed in the process of creating this piece.
The soundtrack is composed from oral history recordings, elements of film soundtracks and sound recordings from the streets of King’s Cross. Sounds are drifting through the space like passing impressions that are bound to fade - like the impermanence of memory.
Through this a process of exchange is set in motion - between the place in the imagination and in everyday life, its history and present, its transformations and its enduring characteristics.
| German Gymnasium - London, UK | 21 March - 5 April 2009 |