‘Fixed and Fluid’ is a film created as part of a research project exploring the River Lee Navigation in Hackney Wick as a platform for conversation amongst a community.
Travelling through an area of fast-paced urban transformation, the canal provides a prominent margin, a boundary and a border between the areas historic past and its recently formed present and future. Yet it also provides a connection, a vein and a vessel, moving between and amongst communities, creating links and forming ties. The film seeks to explore the juxtapositions of the canal as a site of both connection and separation, reflection and transformation, stillness and displacement.
Travelling through an area of fast-paced urban transformation, the canal provides a prominent margin, a boundary and a border between the areas historic past and its recently formed present and future. Yet it also provides a connection, a vein and a vessel, moving between and amongst communities, creating links and forming ties. The film seeks to explore the juxtapositions of the canal as a site of both connection and separation, reflection and transformation, stillness and displacement.
The images in the film record the partial perspective of the film-maker, floating along the canal from fixed yet fluid view-point. The soundtrack incorporates natural sounds from the landscape together with speech fragments taken from recorded conversations with local people. The work is heavily inspired by the work of film maker John Smith in ‘Blight’.
The film explores the complex and contradictory nature of research within the built environment through exposing the messy, mis-aligned and fragmentary contributions made by the local community. The film explores a personal struggle to celebrate the scope of embodied knowledge and perspectives contributed by the local community whilst attempting to draw one’s own understanding and knowledge from a series of encounters.
The film explores the complex and contradictory nature of research within the built environment through exposing the messy, mis-aligned and fragmentary contributions made by the local community. The film explores a personal struggle to celebrate the scope of embodied knowledge and perspectives contributed by the local community whilst attempting to draw one’s own understanding and knowledge from a series of encounters.