While listening… Will you look out of the window ? If that is not possible, will you imagine a window ? And from this window see paths, pavements, tracks, short-cuts, roads, streets, fields, meadows, hillsides.
See people move along these routes, going about their day, living, working. People arriving. People leaving. See people move through these spaces over hours, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries.
Be attentive to their feelings, their fear, their joy, their struggle, their comfort, their suffering, their laughter, their terror, their delight, their voices, their faces, their boredom, their jokes, their singing, their stories, their labour, their loneliness, their hope. See them… Look out of the window.
Hear the industrial waves sweeping in one after the other.
Each smooth glide says P R O D U C T I O N.
Each smooth glide of traffic says ‘We are working’
Each smooth glide says ‘Things are happening, things are rolling forward’
Each smooth glide says ‘This is something you can measure. This is accountable.’
Each smooth glide says ‘We are not troubled, the difficult, unaccountable things at home have no place in our measurements.’
This is beyond malleable history. There is a blurring, but there is a sharpening too, nastier, more hidden.
Isolation sounds rumble, stretch and linger, pierced by ambulances through the day, eve and night. Each morning I see a group of 6 or 7 police walk up the road. Where have they walked from and where do they split ? Isolation sounds rumble, stretch and linger.
No, it is not ‘time to move on.’
Move on means avoid the awkward questions.
Move on means evade the angry faces.
Move on means don’t look at their tears.
Move on means erosion of communities.
Move on means dilute the injustice.
Move on means divert the trauma.
Move on means sweep it under the carpet.
Feelings, convictions, and unease chatter rhythms through the day, eve and night. Every evening I see the tall man and his mother out for exercise. He drives to the gate near the wasteland and opens the car door for her. She walks very very slowly and he slows his pace to walk very very slowly with her. They walk and talk and head off into the open ground. They walk as far as the heap of gravel, turn, and head back. They climb into the car, and he drives away again. The loving attention he gives to her throughout resonates.
Anne-Marie Copestake works with moving images, sound, text, print and sculpture, with moving images at the core of her practice. In 2019 Anne-Marie worked with the team at Cooper Gallery on a solo exhibition and programme of events. The exhibition and events proposed a communicative, collaborative and egalitarian engagement with others, a mediation on the politics of the unsung and the tangible passion of collectivity in the everyday, drawing attention to the social and political fabric of language and how a lone voice immediately calls another to recognise its presence.
Image courtesy Anne-Marie Copestake