Blue Wall

“Are there still borders? More than ever! Every street has its borderline. Between each plot, there's a strip of no-man's-land disguised as a hedge or a ditch.”

Driver, Wings of Desire

What interests me about the city is that everything is temporary. It is in constant flux. The city limits of London are forever changing shape and expanding, creating new urban spaces on top of the ruins of the old ones.

This work began as an exploration of the blue wall that borders the 2012 Olympic site, looking at the impact of such a monumental construction on the surrounding Lower Lea Valley area in East London. However, it is not just the wall that became the subject of the photographs, but the colour blue itself. Using blue as the motif of the work, these images depict a combination of the wall’s intrepid presence within the East London landscape, and the narrative encounters found at the edges of these spaces.

The eastern section of the city is mainly occupied by industrial land and housing developments. Being one of the largest remaining regeneration opportunities in inner London, the wall is the most obvious manifestation so far of a new kind of ‘city-within-a-city’. This idea of a ‘city-within-a-city’, suggests a paradoxical relationship between the ‘real’ space that occupies the outside of this boundary, and the potential ‘utopian’ space on the other. Michel Foucault, in his seminal piece of writing ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1967), stated, ‘We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.’ Although he discussed this in relation to what he termed ‘heterotopias’, I use it here to further suggest the ‘blue wall’, acting as a kind of zone, separating one type of space from another. The space concealed behind the wall being that of the future, of a new urban landscape. Time, therefore, forms an important part to this work. The continuous reference back to the wall and thus, the Olympics, has the effect of distilling a rather ominous sense within the images. The present traces of the wall or blue objects found within these spaces hint towards the impending alteration that will occur in the future.

On a larger scale, this interpretation points to how this vast space of inner city flatland has now succumbed to the ominous effects of globalization. It is significant that the design of the London Olympics is to invest in the infrastructure of the city, to regenerate an area of land using the games as a model to change the city. After all, the Olympics is about an event, but it is also about the architecture of a space. Olympics take place in stadiums but it is the city that becomes the backdrop to the event.