After The Bell

“What appears in the night is the night that appears. And this eeriness does not simply come from something invisible, which would reveal itself under cover of darkness and at the shadows summons…”

Maurice Blanchot1

‘After The Bell’ is a financial term for activity by traders occurring after the close of the stock market. I use it here to refer to the night cleaners that enter these spaces after trading has stopped. Their activities are not recognised, their presence is usually undetected.

Based in Canary Wharf, London, this video is an investigation of the unseen and the marginal. Concentrating on the maintenance staff that clean the corporate offices at night, it explores the relationship between these ‘invisible’ people and the space in which they work. These financial spaces could also be regarded as 'invisible', as the companies’ function on the basis of trading ‘virtual’ monetary value (stocks and shares), which have themselves, no physical entity. This is reflected within the interior of these companies as nothing about the appearance suggests global trade. Thousands of workers enter these environments at night, momentarily crossing paths with a trader working late, to wipe away the trace of activity left after another day of profits and losses. They are fundamental to the functioning of a global economy yet their existence is only recognised under the cover of darkness.

This video is a visual response to The Man Of The Crowd (1840), a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, exploring ideas of the urban encounter. Set at night, Poe takes us on a journey through the streets of London to follow a passer-by he notices in a café. In the end he gives up and announces-'It will be in vein to follow, for I shall learn no more of him, nor his deeds'2. The inherent detachment we experience in the city is explored in this video. From outside looking in, or face to face with the workers, the anonymous individuals will never be fully revealed. Momentary glimpses drawn out by the camera will always fall short of revealing anything other than that moment.

The night acts as a metaphor for this detachment as it can be viewed as existing outside of time. By this, I mean that the night acts as a marker, separating one day from the next in a society rigorously governed by the clock. And like the night, these anonymous individuals stand outside of time. They are there when we are asleep, and gone when we wake. Yet paradoxically, even as the office spaces of corporate banks and broker companies lay empty and the markets close, they represent a global economy that never seizes to stop. As Sylviane Agacinski states, “Globalisation is the unification of the worlds rhythms, all adjusted to the Western clock”3.