Temporary, yet intense: Affective Atmospheres of Junction’s Temporary ‘Jam’ in the Cambridge Skatescape

“The Cam skate night was a special experience, it brought together all walks of life that shared the same love for skateboarding under one roof.”

- Matt O’Niell, Owner of Courts Skateshop (first Cambridge based skate brand in a long, long time and local skate legend).

The framing of ‘Courts’ nominally alludes to the grassy landscapes that span across Cambridge colleges. Though in the context of skating, courts takes on a new form and meanings that hint at the politics of inclusion/exclusion operative across these college courts of potential skate-spaces.

Disappearing as winter approaches, the seasonal Cambridge Skatescape and its skaters retreat into hibernation. The two local outdoor parks are too wet to skate in the fleeting moments of daytime sunlight. The sun set marks the skatescape’s daily rest, a 4pm cut off point for the affective atmospheres that envelop the local city ‘skate spots’. The council’s persistent attempts to delay the installation of flood lights by Jesus Green and Trumpington emblematise the underlying tension between external state duress and insurgent state communities that undercuts the practice of urban skating.

“I haven’t been skating for the past three weeks because of the weather and how dark it is so it’s really nice to have a space to skate with lots of people.. A good atmosphere with good obstacles…”

- Voice interview by Paul Elbro

Without any official ‘invited spaces of citizenship’ created by the city municipalities for Cambridge’s skate culture, a growing countercultural movement (“Cam Skate”) has resorted to a DIY-ethos, inventing their own spaces. Junction, a site for music and party culture was temporarily transmuted into a space for a different embodied lifestyle: skateboarding. Working with the venue, Cam Skate set up a charity skate session to create a winter refuge for the Cambridge skatescape on November 24th 2022. Each ten pounds entry fee funded the new Donkey Common Skatepark, another contentious space within the Cambridge Skatescape of urban ruination, coun- cil neglect and skater despair. With rain and darkness prevailing outside, skaters forged their own space and atmosphere out of an empty music venue.

So, how was this space transformed into a skate-friendly space? What sort of ethical imperatives underpinned this recreation of a room into a skatepark? The ground becoming a dancefloor, yet staging a different embodied movement from the usual skank and dance. Junction’s surface temporarily the canvas for the art of a ‘backside flip’ over the white DIY barrier and the performativity of a 50-50 grind across the rail that severed the space’s normality. Skater’s danced their identity and ontology into space, inscribing their lifeworld into the surroundings. Junction’s atmosphere, transformed by a fleeting dance of the Cambridge skatescape; the dances of skateboarding an ontology of being and an entire ethos for life. There is an emptiness in the venue, lacking any inherent affectivities of skating itself. Even after the ‘skate spots’ were arranged, assembled and physically inscribed in the space, the sterile atmosphere remained. Still just a room, yet now with a quarter-pipe, a bump and a few rails and ledges. A space now with the potential to be skated, yet fundamentally lacking the atmosphere of skating. Junction a space with latent potential, only activated once bodies start to skate through space. The environment holding a potential later realised through physicalities and sensualities of moving bodies.

Even with the arrival of the first set of skaters – the first moving bodies to interact with the skate-space – I did not feel or sense the skatesphere I’m so used to and addicted to. As time passed and more skaters arrived, the space shrank as bodies and boards began to occupy every corner, obstacle and surface space. The atmosphere rose, temporarily enveloping Junction, surrounding the skaters, spectators, obstacles and space with an emotional sphere of skateboarding: indescribable yet sensually palpable; invisible yet intense; physical in appearance, yet immaterial in ‘feeling’; a ‘junction’ in space and time. It is a space temporarily transformed into a skatopia; a heterotopic space for Cambridge’s subaltern counterpublic.

The soundscape of grinds, laughter, collisions and ‘hype’ steadily amplified. My ears attune to these unusual sounds that make all skaters feel so comfortable. The soundscape that makes me forget the ordinary issues of late-capitalist modernity, an invitation to an addiction that powerfully makes me forget the vices of the everyday. Skating away from the everyday, mundane violences of ordinary life, I’m distracted through sounds of this self-imposed, voluntarily embodied vulnerability. A sonic ecology of skateboarding sociality, a collective aesthetic of phono-materiality that underpins the psychogeography of this temporary space.

Skating through space. Sounding their movement. A collective melody for their dance of escape. Skating a path to liberation, an escape of solidarity and identity. A space animated by sounds and feels of bodies, wheels and boards.

The affective intensity of the skate jam, inherently physical and corporeal, yet equally emotional, sensual and subjective. The sounds of boards snapping the slippery surface (a constant feature of complaint across the night) rippled across the room. The surface transformed into a stage directing everyone’s attention to the ‘centre-stage’ performance around the DIY bump and white barrier.

Skate-etiquette, one of the few codes of conduct, unknown to those outside our language game and culture, was central to this fleeting, yet intense ‘feel’ of the room. An informal line forming, determin- ing who gets to perform next. Who gets to try their trick over the white barrier. A competition naturally arose, yet of intense communitarianism and mutual respect rather than jealously, greed and individuality. The skate jam’s atmosphere a product of entangled individuality, performances necessarily co-produced with other bodies moving in space. The skater’s individuality momentarily expressed during their ‘turn’ to traverse the space, yet simultaneously enveloped into the communal affective economy of the crowd and jam. Any trick landed by an individual celebrated as an achievement for the group. The individual becomes communal: the collective self created between the entanglement of moving bodies and the agency of surfaces. Skate culture situated within a state of disorientation - a hyper affective and mobile way of moving through space to offer personal freedom within a close community of kinship. The atmosphere generates a collective self that moves in, through and with space. The space affectively became one of and for solidarity transformed by a competitive sociality between bodies.

This affective ‘Junction’ in the skatesphere cannot be reduced to any one object, surface or aspect of space. The inter-being of skaters and their space, objects, boards and bodies inseparable; an assemblage of moving bodies extending through their boards into the surface. A physical, sonic and social entanglement affectively producing this temporary ‘Junction’ of atmosphere in the skatescape. An imagined space of and for skateboarding movement and citizenship, an inherently disorientating spatial practice that rejects normativity whilst asserting communality. A network of human actors and non-human objects that allow energy to flow and skate through the space.

As quickly as it was set up, the obstacles were removed and skaters returned back to hibernation. The atmosphere dissipated as the sounds, bodies and objects moved out into the streets. Only the surface and the room itself remain, a blank slate ready for its next inscription and performance. A fleeting atmosphere forming and deforming, appearing and disappearing, graspable only for a moment (or night).

Each skater and obstacle carry with them the affective hauntings of the skate jam in their memory. The junction surface, forever a living memory of this skatespheric movement. The scratches, marks and physical traces a permanent ruination and feel of the Cambridge skatescape. An unexpected space sporadically transmutes into a site for skater culture, identity and belonging.

The affect of skaters spatially inscribed into this space between 7 and 9pm. A moment living on only in physical, emotional and digital memory. The entanglement within this human-non-human assemblage produces a temporary, yet intense ‘Junction’ of refuge for the Cambridge Skatescape agents. For two hours a definitively skater-space, yet any time outside this frame the space retreats to its empty state. By morning the material norm returned as the memories of emotions and affect remain forever a ghostly presence of the skater’s performative moment in this space.

The jam temporal in physical reality, yet permanent in memory and feeling. Skaters and their sounds, feelings and emotions of movement assembled this transience and ephemeral atmosphere. Bruises mark the space’s surfaces, of bodies, floors, rails and ledges; emotional traces of skater’s affectivity in Junction.

A physical, emotional and affective pop-up in space. A performative moment forever in my memory.