Last week we began the install for the final chapter of Roads & Flowers, our community project based in Sheffield. For those of you who are new to Incidental, this project is a durational project based in a new housing development, on the site of one of England’s first garden city developments.
Among other things, the project aims to address the notion of “authentic stories” so prevalent in community arts. The dangers that surround notions of authenticity are one our ongoing concerns at Incidental. Authenticity is a strangely widespread default when dealing with more deprived communities - it often seems that under the guise of “empowerment”, fixed, historico-cultural identities are imposed upon such groups by middle-class cultural organisations and communities … whilst the latter have no need or desire to be tied to such identities themselves. What is often presented as empowerment operates more like containment, aestheticisation or suppression.
This project employs a “swerve” to that process - by taking fragments of stories that do relate to the area, but then subjecting them to a bunch of transformations - mainly by melding them with wilfull fictions, fantasies and distortions told by local school children. We’ll shortly be exploring these ideas more expansively in essays elsewhere, but in essence, it seems to us that the fictions and lies a community can tell are as interesting and as important as any apparently verifiable facts. For anyone interested, its worth noting that our thinking in this area is strongly influenced by Michaul Taussig’s excellent writings, particularly The Magic of the State, and The Nervous System.
Anyway, this is the fourth and final chapter of the work, each of which has been published in physical space in the area. The first three were temporary (on the bricks of demolished houses, winter lanterns and treasure-hunt wood blocks, respectively), and the fourth is installed permanently around the new development - a distributed poem that you read as you explore the site.
The idea is that these four chapters will now be gathered together and publishd in book form to create a kind of magical-realist narrative, told entirely through the text in the photographs. A proto-photo-graphic novel, or something similar, i guess. Should be published by the end of the year, so more soon on that one …
