Stalking the Zone
A couple of months back I watched Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker for the first time. Returning to our site on the 22nd December for an exploration with fellow Nottingham explorers Rebecca and Mat - and Will from Berlin - I was really put in mind of the 'zone' in which so much of Stalker's action takes place. There's a strange timelessness to the wasteland- particularly in the area around the former Great Northern Railway warehouses - and it's not too much of a leap of the imagination to think that the usual laws of time and physics might not apply, as appears to be the case in Tarkovsky's great film.
I am, however, wary of narratives of timelessness: as John Cunningham has pointed out, the fetishisation of industrial ruins can lead to a worryingly apolitical narrative which strips humanity of political agency. And the way we're thinking through the site at the moment is very much concerned with notions of (a disrupted) temporality: our site seems haunted by what it was, what it could have been and what it could yet be, and we're hoping to use this project to confuse these visions- an 'archaeology of the future' (to borrow a phrase from Fredric Jameson) to go alongside a suggestive archaeology of the past.
For now though, here are some photographs from that December visit. I'd invite you to listen to this whilst viewing (click on photos for larger version).
