NEWS / REEL
Necessary Journeys Symposium Paper
NEWS / REEL
susan pui san lok, NEWS (London: SPSL, 2005), 150x100mm, 32pp,
ISBN 978-0-9551849-0-1 (front & back covers)Residency as journey, as placement, as displacement, as engagement, as departure.
I’ve been away, not far but away, making temporary residence at MACE, the Media Archive for Central England. The archive’s home, after several moves, is the University of Nottingham, in turn partially re-housed in the old Carlton television studios. ‘Here’ I am then, moving with others, voluntarily and otherwise, into a half-refurbished site, for a sedentary journey. Freshly painted white-walls screen bright new offices, while warren-like turns give way to cavernous spaces, some stacked with objects in transit, others once filled with fake supermarket aisles and game-show sets, now places/non-places awaiting re-habitation.
For some 50 years between 1956 and 2005, the studios were also the regional hub for the production of ITV Central News programmes. Most of this material is now at MACE, comprising nearly half of its semi-catalogued holdings, some 27,000 containers of film. To navigate the collection, one can turn to several idiosyncratic and overlapping news index systems – these are manual, yet to be digitized, supplemented by the differently idiosyncratic mental libraries of stock viewed by the archive’s keepers.
Embarking on this residency of some ten days over a period of a month, I recognize the impossibility of ‘knowing’ or ‘seeing’ the archive in its entirety: its disparate body ever expanding, its items accumulating – no amount of time could catch up with all the time ‘caught’. I also soon realize that even the annotated elements of the archive available are elusive, their odd classifications, orderings and language veiling as much as revealing their location and contents: it seems the index can be as opaque and obscure as the unquantifiable repository, the cool, darkened vault.
In response, my aims are strategic and double – to engage with the scope of the archive made visible or legible through systematic yet idiosyncratic translation, the archive-as-index if you like; and to seek out materials that might feed into an ongoing project called, ‘Golden’. What I would like to present here today are interim works relating to these dual strands of exploration, respectively titled NEWS and REEL.
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susan pui san lok, NEWS (London: SPSL, 2005), 150x100mm, 32pp,
ISBN 978-0-9551849-0-1 (sample pages)In the archive-as-index, both order and content are unpredictable, and cross-references sporadic: nothing is where one might assume. ‘Dancing’ is filed under ‘E’ for ‘Entertainments’, and ‘Allotments’ under ‘H’ for ‘Hobbies’, but also variously under, ‘Ceremonies’, ‘India & the Indians’, ‘Stunts’, and ‘Old Age’, among others. Searching randomly, laterally, circuitously, the prosaic language of the index accrues into a strange and amorphous, disturbing blank poetry: “two Asians killed in a riot… Himalayan bears… coloured children in a playground… a lone protestor outside a new Japanese restaurant… the first Sikh traffic warden… picnicking Vietnamese children…” Visible and tangible, mechanical and human quirks are evidenced in misaligned letters and cards, misspellings, and handwritten addenda; but any nostalgia provoked by the charm of outdated technologies and outmoded activities is periodically tempered by the too-close discomfort of not-so-long outdated terminologies. The perfunctory and seemingly ‘objective’ language of the news, an evolving, live discourse simultaneously reflective and productive of shifting social and cultural mores, charts – unsurprisingly – a preoccupation with the ‘foreign’ that coincides with a period of mass immigration to Britain, and the subsequent negotiations of first and second generation diasporic subjects.
The travellers’ tales intimated in the archive are often incidental, side-lined by blunter encounters and confrontations, ‘Foreign-ness’ rarely constitutes the ‘story’ as such, though it is frequently implied and noted; noteworthy if not newsworthy. Undertaking a disorientating detour through decades compressed into newspeak, I have begun to collate the ‘foreign’, wandering through these categories and some 4,000 alphabetical and chronological entries, wondering what shape the archive re-narrativised according to the one-time new, current, curious, strange or estranged, might take. In the interim I present the NEWS in brief, an A to Z of the indirect, sometimes random and oblique invocations of other peoples, other places, other cultures, in an idiosyncratic index of my own. In the form of a postcard book, ‘old news’ is re-newed, re-entering circulation as missives from the archive.
Remembering that journeys entail movements and perspectives not only from ‘here’ to ‘there’, but also at least from ‘there’ to ‘here’, and ‘departure’, like ‘arrival’, is never final or conclusive, but perpetual, an ongoing mutual encounter, such unraveling dualities unravel another: ‘home’ and ‘away’. ‘Away’ becomes ‘home’, ‘away’ becomes ‘here’, ‘home news’ becomes ‘foreign’, and the ‘foreign’ becomes ‘home’.
susan pui san lok, REEL, DVD, alternating audio/video loop, 5’ 14”. Archive images reproduced with permission from Central ITV.
The second strand of my residency feeds into research towards an ongoing series of works under the umbrella title, ‘Golden’, a project concerned with notions and articulations of nostalgia and aspiration in diaspora, ideas of departure and return, and metaphors of ‘cultivation’. By ‘cultivation’ I mean both the idea of social and cultural aspirations, and the idea that particular identities, memories, and territories might be ‘cultivated’ through specific linguistic and leisure practices, such as the speaking of Chinglish, ballroom dancing, or allotment tending.
REEL is another work in progress, a sound and video piece that might eventually include some 25 sequences based on archival material – a loose formal correspondence to alphabetical and chronological spans. The first of these, which I will show in a moment, draws on dance footage, that might variously be classified as cultural, national or traditional. What I’m interested in is the ritualized performance and parade of culture abstracted through a series of symbolic, stylised and codified moves, gestures, and looks – the performance, participation, presentation and consumption of cultural pride, cultural identity, cultural difference, cultural spectacle, and the implicit yet untenable notion of ‘tradition’ as somehow authentic, timeless and transmissable.
The sequence separates sound from image, an act of disjuncture that seeks to resist or complicate the service of the former to the latter, and consequent evocation and promise of escape to some ‘other’ time and place. There follows 5 segments, the material repeatedly unfolding according to a linear chrono- logic, yet countered by the repetition and variation of a particular thematic, gesture or motif. The very medium and materiality of archive film is seductive, inviting an easy nostalgia which I attempt to interrogate: by juxtaposing moments of anticipation and distraction, with moments of absorption and uniformity, and countering the gaze of various audiences with those of performers, layered upon which are, of course, our individual and collective gazes, as voyeurs and voyagers of the seemingly archaic.
susan pui san lok, REEL, 2005, DVD, 5’14”, alternating audio/video loop (audio clip)
susan pui san lok, REEL 2005, DVD, 5’14”, alternating audio/video loop (video clip)
susan pui san lok, REEL, 2005, DVD, 5’14”, alternating audio/video loop (stills)
Necessary Journeys Symposium Programme
