Failing Orbit 3 - Economy / Edges

Chicken in a bun £1, 2010

The landscape, pitted as it is by the obvious signs of economic failure, austerity-measures and social-immobility, is a space where the dreams of success now lay tattered across its surface. The desires of excess have now been replaced by anxieties over the excesses of others. Once activated by the shiny new corporate surfaces of redevelopment, such desires have now been displaced to the mundane fringes of our urban centres.

In the late twentieth century, and first decade of the twenty-first, one desired an ideal ‘work-home-leisure-retail’ space, each one compartmentalised, but where the boundaries of each were seamlessly crossed; commuter-belt housing; urban-living in flats above Starbucks; supermarkets modelled on farmer’s markets; etc. The very consumption processes that structured everyday space had turned it into a fiction. City centres became privatised ‘zones’ and were given over to corporate demands; structured to keep the flow of consumption steadily moving, yet modelled to give the appearance of an everyday urban reality. The Simulacrum had indeed displaced the real, and the dream had flipped tragically into nightmare. 

The contours of this fiction have, only now, begun to reveal themselves in the dog-eared, marginalised spaces of the current economic climate. However, the intangible edges of social spaces, that are mapped in these photographs, are precarious places indeed. Peripheral zones are regularly off-limits. Anxiety keeps one moving through space; after all, only the perverse and deranged ‘hang around’ in these in-between spaces. Yet, where else to begin looking for the ruptures in social space? At the fringes one might find a tattered corner to be peeled back, under which might be revealed a zombie-fied version of the everyday; some terrifying Other possibility. Or worse, one may find that nothing at all, in fact, exists beyond the illusions that have been cast.