Our Distance Became Water: exhibition catalogue

Indeed, the act of speculating futures by returning to the past, encapsulated in Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s assemblages, is an important element of the artist’s practice, manifesting in his fictional text Our Distance Became Water, which imagines existence in a sinking city, where familiar co-ordinates dissolve beneath rising waters. A touchstone for this recent writing, as for the Polyptychs series and his Flats series of paintings, is JG Ballard’s 1963 novel The Drowned World, in which civilisation recedes in the face of watery inundation to be reclaimed by nature. But the novel’s revelation rests on how the reader is able to read this catastrophe through the lens of current geographies where, as David Ian Paddy notes in The Empires of JG Ballard, the jungle in which the novel’s protagonists attempt to survive, is in fact London, ‘transformed beyond recognition by global warming’ (p.49).

According to Paddy, ‘with giant lizards and alligators circulating around the Ritz hotel, it is a twist that relies on an unsettling of known geography, on making the familiar terrain of London uncanny’. Ballard himself, in his 1963 article in The Woman Journalist Magazine, relates The Drowned World to his childhood experience of Shanghai where ‘the annual long summer of floods, when the streets of the city were two or three feet deep in a brown siltladen water’ was a regular phenomenon of city