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

Co-presenters: Sarah Cole and Anne Eggebert

For this presentation Cole and Eggebert presented extracts from the videos they made for exhibition at Valentine's Mansions.

As visual artists they were commissioned to make work for newly restored Valentines Mansion (LB Redbridge). The work sought out the sites in Venice of the wallpaper vignettes found at Valentine's, which they projected into the 18th century dovecote and in the gallery of the mansion house. Testing contemporary leisure activities in historic space as a comment on the construction of place through visual memory and the perception of physical temporary space. They also discussed 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 reflected 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.

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