Folly - representation of the performing body in the (new) historic landscape

Presenters: Sarah Cole and Anne Eggebert

As visual artists they were commissioned to make work for newly restored Valentines Mansion (LB Redbridge). Their starting point were Venetian landscape vignettes found in vintage wallpaper in the house, noting the peopling of these images, and that the beginnings of the travel leisure industry in Europe were informed by popular home décor culture. For this presentation they will present extracts from their resulting video work that seeks out the sites in Venice of the wallpaper’s vignettes, projected recently in an 18th century dovecote and in the gallery of the mansion house. This work tests contemporary leisure activities in historic space as a comment on the construction of place through visual memory and the perception of physical temporary space. Alongside the video material they will consider a series of photographs that capture a 21st century leisure pursuit, free-running, over the Mansion’s follies. In contrast to the wallpaper vignette, or traditional view, they will also discuss how alternative perspectives provided through virtual representations of landscape (e.g. Google Earth) afford freerunner athletes a multiplicity of surfaces to be physically encountered, the absorption of his flow across ‘useless extravagant structures’ of the historic folly landscape.

The presentation will reflect on the performers’ place in time, history and geography and how this work has impacted on the community’s engagement with this new public arts venue. The audience’s visual encounter with their work, presented in the site, has lead to a re-inscribing of the architecture as a space of elsewhere – and its potential as cinematic space. They consider the relationship between the cinema as ‘the architectural of an “in-between” – travelling architecture’ (Bruno 2002) – and the moving image as contemporary wallpaper providing our access to travel as we enter the age of post-mobility.