The Wapping Project – To Step Across the Line - Publication May 2018

To Step Across

the Line

Introduction 4 Kapka Kassabova To Step Across the Line 8 Tara Bergin Where is Valentino?

16 Lea Anderson Edges, Frames & Edits 18 MairĂŠad McClean Making Her Mark 26 Notes on a film shoot 40 Contributors 46

Behind the gate, alongside a timber fence, runs a dirt road.

Gradually, its golden sand gives way to grasses and weeds.

The road leads to an open meadow framed to the east by a dense line of deciduous trees swaying the wind. It is late August and the summer sun burnt the grasses to earthy yellows and browns.

In the distance, a red and white post glows in the midday sun, alone on the flat river plain, visible from afar. Somewhere behind the line of trees, on the other side of the river, there must be its blue and yellow counterpart.

This is what constitutes the eastern EU border. No razor wire, no guards, no cameras, just two border posts in different colours facing each other across the river...

Between them, alongside the wild riverbank, runs the furthest path within the EU — the European fringe. Somewhere in the river, there is a line imagined, separating them from us or us from them. This invisible line keeps the river wild.

One can simply swim across the line, or so it seems, crossing the external border of the European Union by leaving Eastern Poland. It is likely that the trespassing would go unnoticed. In the beautiful wilderness of the riverbank with weeping willows and reeds, the border posts are often obscured by lush vegetation and the small sandy islands on the river are most inviting.

It seems that the border is marked most clearly by a ping sound from a mobile phone picking up a foreign network and a bill that arrives sometime later for the usage of data roaming beyond the EU.

Marta Michalowska Reflecting on a recent journey along route 816

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In our third publication, we are presenting three new pieces of writing on borders, lines, frames and edges that constrict, demarcate, define, enclose, separate, limit and open possibilities.

To Step Across the Line by Kapka Kassabova takes the childhood game of hopscotch with lines drawn on a tarmac creating “a microcosm of meaningful boundaries” as a starting point to think about borders and look at the human trauma and ultra-porousness of the real lines in the landscapes separating Bulgaria and Turkey, Turkey and Greece, Thailand and Cambodia. Tara Bergin crosses the lines through her re-interpretation of fragments of Leonardo da Vinci’s Miscellaneous Notebooks in Where is Valentino?. She considers translation as a form of crossing that sometimes results in crossed lines — misinterpretation — and works with the possibilities it unlocks for poetry. Edges, Frames and Edits

by Lea Anderson explores the openings for imagination in dull films and TV. Lea developed a method for translating feature films into dance performances through discarding the narrative and focusing on the frame of the cinematic image and the characters’ movement in and out of shot — the space created by edits.

The publication concludes with a text and images by Mairéad McClean announcing her visual arts commission Making Her Mark, whose first iteration will be exhibited at Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre on the island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides this summer.

Marta Michalowska and Thomas Zanon-Larcher Directors of The Wapping Project May 2018

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To Step Across the Line Kapka Kassabova

There is something about borderlines that attracts and repels at once. As soon as a line is drawn in the sand, a desire arises to step across it. Like the need to tell stories, the need to step across the line may be hardwired in our brains. The favourite neighbourhood game of my childhood was hopscotch. All you needed was a piece of chalk. You drew a few lines on the asphalt, and you created a microcosm of meaningful boundaries. You jumped in and out, in and out, and the winner was she who didn’t stumble and lose her Balance.

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All my life, I have had a hyper-awareness of borders. I grew up behind the iron curtain in a country whose villages, rivers and mountains within twenty or so miles of the national border were a militarised, no-go Border Zone. This was in fact Europe’s southernmost stretch of the iron curtain, and it was ostensibly there to protect us, though — I saw this later but sensed it even as a child — its barbs were pointing inwards.

The border, a near-mythical entity that couldn’t be approached, seen or touched, was a wall as long as the country, electrified and alarmed by Soviet technology in 1961 — the same year as the Berlin Wall went up.

Hidden by Balkan peaks and impassable forests, the border was out of sight but everywhere, like the State. It was the background hum of the days, the barely perceptible buzz of the nights. It was that which never slept. It was near the Black Sea beaches where we went for holidays along with the burntskinned East Germans, Poles and Czechoslovaks, some of whom went swimming towards Turkey, swimming until they were swept out to their deaths by unexpected currents, or made a run for the forested land border, or — on one occasion — went up in an air balloon and crossed into Turkey, like a bird. Like the tens of thousands of storks that darkened our Pontic skies in spring and left for Africa in autumn.

It was near the mountain villages where we went to pick berries and climb fir-trees from which you could see Greece but not visit it.

The border was in the expression zad granitsa, ‘beyond the border’, which simply meant ‘abroad’ but had a shivery one way feel to it, a beyond-the-pale feel. ‘Beyond the pale’ is in fact a colonial phrase, all the way from a 14th century expression coined in Ireland where it meant any territory that remained beyond English dominion, meaning beyond the pales, or stakes, demarcating its outer edges. Which brings to mind the Scottish Borders.

Back in the day, border reavers collected ‘taxes’ from travellers, and The Book of Scots law decreed that you couldn’t pollute Scottish rivers — unless they flowed across the border into England. Four centuries after the Union of Crowns put an end to the political border, their name has remained, and to this day, the empty roads and denuded hills of the Scottish Borders

retain an eerie charge, a ghostly desolation. This is the way of borders and margins: they remain haunted for decades, generations, centuries after their sombre power has lapsed. Today, the most border-like experience available is on the train from London to Edinburgh. Somewhere before North Berwick, you may hear an announcement that gladdens your heart, or mine at least: ‘Welcome to Scotland.’ Though I haven’t heard it for a few years. Here, the crossing into another realm is an act of the imagination — the very opposite of the first physical border I sighted, in 1984. That was the Berlin Wall, complete with soldiers and barricades, asserting with grim finality that the two sides would never meet again.

But all hard borders are destined to fall, one day. Twenty-five years after the fall of that wall, I travelled back to the border zone of my childhood. It has been demilitarised, but it is still a realm that operates on its own terms, as fairytales do, and traumatised topographies. I wanted to step across the once-forbidden line, to make up for lost time.

At the Bulgarian-Turkish checkpoint, Europe’s busiest land crossing, lorries queued up for miles, waiting to be processed into the European Union. Sometimes, it took days, and resigned to the wait, drivers set up stoves along the road to brew tea.

Some of them carried the kind of cargo that could land them in jail, though not all of them knew what they carried. I saw Bulgarian border police bust a Turkish lorry driver who carried Iraqi-Kurdish stowaways. They looked emaciated, he looked close to tears, and the border police looked indifferent, but not immune to bribes. Smuggling has always been brisk on this border, and profitable. In the days of Communism, border officials were the wealthiest locals.

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Today, border police on both sides of the border strike deals with people smugglers, so that the already-robbed of this world would be robbed again, and returned to no man’s land.

Leaving the derelict Communist-era silk factories behind, I drove across the line, and a shiny mosque and shopping mall welcomed me to Turkey. My first port of call on the ‘Asian’ side was the ancient city of Edirne, a distorted mirror image of ancient Svilengrad (Silk Town) on the ‘European’ side. In Svilengrad, you can almost hear the muezzins of Edirne; in Edirne, you can almost hear the thumping of Svilengrad’s casinos. Gambling is banned in Turkey so Turkish gamblers head to Bulgaria. Family values are compulsory in Turkey, but on weekends, the hotel-casinos of Svilengrad heave with trans-border sex tourism. At Edirne’s Friday Market, you can bag snake oil or fake Levis for a few euros.

This border is hell for the refugee, and heaven for the entrepreneur and the corrupt official, the smuggler and the story-teller.

A few weeks later, I entered Turkey from Greece, at a somnolent small-town checkpoint. The Greek guards, apparently struck with some kind of sleeping illness, yawned as they waved me through, but the spell lifted on the Turkish side which welcomed me with armed soldiers and a customs official who proceeded to gut the contents of my rented car. Later, I was told that the typical drug mule at this border is a woman in a rented car, with a passport to one of the Balkan nations — just like me. The previous week, a Romanian woman had been arrested with a stash of cocaine sewn under the seats. I stood sweating in the sun — checkpoints feel hot even in winter — as a busload of Greek tourists looked on. Their bags were being checked too.

They were not ordinary tourists, as it happens, but ancestral tourists. Every summer, the children and grandchildren of refugees from the Balkans Wars (1912-1913), World War One, and the Greek-Turkish War (1919-1922) travel to the abandoned houses of their ancestors, in Turkish border villages and towns.

The Turks can’t travel so easily into Europe, so they sit in their village squares drinking glasses of tea, and feeling all the emotions of their Greek and Bulgarian visitors: the loss, the grief, the confusion. Because they too are grandchildren of one-time Muslim refugees from Greece and Macedonia, Bulgaria and Bosnia — the peoples of the former Ottoman Empire whose borders in Europe were being redrawn by militant Balkan nationalisms and the ruthless games of the Great Powers.

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All of this haunts the land, making the stress of border crossing in the Balkans hard to convey — even in broad daylight, with the right passport and nothing to declare. With clammy hands, I drove down the corridor of barbed wire between Greece and Turkey, narrow and one-directional like a birthing canal. It was a living souvenir from the cold war, when this border was darkened by the armies of three ‘enemy’ countries: Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria. A pink flamingo from the border river Evros flew above me like an omen, though good or bad, I couldn’t tell.

Borders express our collective anxiety for clarity and certainty, here and there, us and them. But over time, borders flicker like mercury, move like shifting sands beneath our feet, collapse yet haunt the landscape, and are redrawn, a generation later, in the name of some new fear that isn’t new at all.

In the meantime, they inflict psychic wounds.

Just as my book Border was coming out, I travelled to SouthEast Asia, and accidentally stumbled across the closest Asian equivalent to my border: the notorious crossing at Poi Pet, at the Thai-Cambodian border. ‘Infamous Poi Pet’ is infamous for much deadlier reasons than tourists realise, worried as they are about visa scams and impromptu fees demanded by officials in currencies you don’t have.

About twenty miles from the checkpoint, coming from the Thai side, you begin to experience a tense, border kind of feeling.

Thai army road-blocks appear at regular intervals, along banners that read ‘Country, religion, monarchy, people’. This was once the site of the largest refugee camp in Asia, housing 250,000 traumatised Cambodians who had survived the genocidal regime of Pol Pot, but didn’t wish to remain in Cambodia.

Thailand didn’t want them either. Some families of Cambodian refugees who had crossed into Thai territory were turned back at gun-point by Thai soldiers, and forced to march across mined terrain back into Cambodia. Their bones remain here, in these lesser known Killing Fields.

Once you reach the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet, it becomes clear that a brisk border economy thrives here. The young Finnish couple who shared a taxi with us had blank faces and empty suitcases. They had no intention of going across into Cambodia, they were not interested in Angkor Wat or the legacy of the Khmer Rouge. No, they were here to shop, and the unambiguously named Border Hotel was just across the street from the border shopping mall.

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Cambodians go across to buy Thai produce at the border market or do seasonal work, and Thais go across to Poi Pet town, to gamble their lives away, sometimes literally. Every year there are murders in the casinos on the Cambodian side, involving the three main gambling nationalities of the region — Chinese, Thai, and Korean. Although Cambodians have recently been banned from gambling, prostitution and sex trafficking remains big business here. If the Thai side is a cheerful purgatory where you run a dusty gauntlet to the checkpoint, of stalls selling fried beetles, the Cambodian side is a beautiful inferno.

You enter the Kingdom of Cambodia through a massive gate

of carved Khmer stone, straight into the arms of hawkers who will sell you everything you don’t need, from contraband cigarettes to ‘massage’. A miasmic odour rises from the canal that runs across the border and where I glimpsed shadowy figures scuttling across — Cambodians skipping passport control — and worried for them.

As with the Bulgarian-Turkish and Greek-Turkish border, the ThaiCambodian border is radioactive with human trauma, but also ultra-porous. As porous as the history of the region and the morality of its power brokers. On the Cambodian side, until only fifteen years ago, the road to Siam Reap and Angkor Wat (now driven in two hours) was impassable; the border zone was being mined by the Khmer Rouge well into the 1990s. The hills in the more remote border areas are still mined.

Here, as in my native borderlands, nightmares come and go in the shape of political regimes and rapacious governments, each replacing the next, but gambling remains a long-standing speciality in the geo-political game of monopoly.

For as long as hard borders are nightmared into being by the ruthless and the fearful, the powerful and the brainwashed, the deadly hopscotch for grown-ups will continue. And with it — the human need to tell the stories of what happens when you step across the line, quickly, terribly light with just the clothes on your back, and your hopes, and everything that you left behind. Trying not to stumble and lose your balance.

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*from the Miscellaneous Notes of Leonardo da Vinci

Tara Bergin Where is Valentino?*

Where is Valentino?

His little face; his tiny boots and waistcoat?

Is he behind the bedstead of Santa Maria?

Secret.

Is he in a box in the Custom’s House?

Secret.

Is he in a room in the tower?

I spy… small knives and forks; Valentino’s bib. [singsong]: Oh Valentino!

Where are you?

A box — a cage — a square — to make the bird for Valentino’s book: small boots; small shoes; small pen and ruler; a pair of spectacles.

I see Valentino!

Tiny face in the barber’s mirror, the child’s coverall, electric shaver quietly revealing white skin.

He cannot see himself — the barber took his glasses from him.

Little Valentino: fractions; boards and paper; chalk.

How to draw a leopard?

How to draw a bear?

Boots and gloves and socks and combs.

A tiny chair.

Edges, Frames & Edits Lea Anderson

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On occasion, I find myself in a theatre watching a performance that I am failing to engage with.

I have come to realise when this happens that I’m able to filter out the work that is actually happening before my eyes and use the opportunity to imagine a different performance there on the stage in front of me. A more interesting performance.

In 2009, it happened that I was watching a very boring film on TV and, instead of turning it off or watching something else, I discovered that it was in my power to transform this unsatisfactory experience into a positive one. I found I could completely disconnect with the story-telling aspect of the film and view the work as a dance.

I imagined that every time there was an edit in the film the character on the screen had actually leapt out of the frame and the next performers jumped in simultaneously to act the next shot. I imagined that sometimes the second group might be wearing the same costume as the people jumping out of the clip before, for example, in the case of a wide shot followed by a closer shot of the same two people. This is a kind of “antinarrative� technique. You end up focusing on the edits and the story sort of vanishes.

This viewing technique led me to imagining what the characters were doing with the body parts that were not visible in the frame. I preferred to think of the most unlikely action that legs could be performing out of sight of the camera, whilst the actors maintained the calm upper body shown on screen. I enjoyed this experiment enormously and perfected my technique by watching all films and TV in this way with the result that I had no idea whatsoever what any of it was about.

A few months later, I decided to try out my method of translating feature film into dance in the rehearsal studio to get it out of my head and into real life. I cast myself in the role of the “film to dance reconstruction expert� and recruited six extremely observant dancers as my practical assistants. I selected a film that only contained one interior location with a limited number of characters.

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We commenced work by taping out the floor to represent the visible area of the film frame. We had to regularly readjust the size of this frame as new considerations arose from the reconstruction. We then started memorising and reproducing every shot and edit contained within a feature film by German writer and director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. We examined and reproduced every action, camera movement and edit.

We devised a system that enabled us to reconstruct the film faithfully in 3d and, in the process, we created a completely different work.

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I wasn’t interested in the words spoken by the actors, just their actions and the movement in the frame created by the performers and the camera moves — the dance contained within the film. Bear in mind that this is actually an impossible task. People in films are not real — they are an illusion — and the movement we see is not real. All the action is viewed by one eye… the camera lens. A row of audience members watching a live performance in a theatre all see something slightly different, but a row of movie watchers sees the same thing. If someone stands behind someone else on a stage, the audience at the edges might be able to see them, even if they are hidden to the majority of spectators. In a film, if someone stands behind someone else that person is obscured to the whole audience. How could we place two dancers in such a way that represents the filmic version? (I can’t explain how that is possible here, but there are options)

When we started to copy what we could see in the film, a whole world of “invisible movement” became visible.

The “appearing” and “disappearing” of people when an edit takes place presented great opportunity for imaginative, instantaneous entrances and exits to the live action frame.

This movement clearly didn’t occur in the film.

The more we watched the edits with a view to replicate them, the more we noticed the varying qualities of different edits. Although an edit is an edge — two pieces of recorded action stuck together, each edit has its own character — soft, percussive, squeezy, etc.

Once observed, the dancers were able to find ways to translate this into real action. We endeavoured to be as literal as possible to what we could see in the film. The more we reconstructed it exactly, ignoring meaning and narrative, the more interesting the dancing became.

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We addressed the ongoing issue of costume changes between shots. Costume changes have to happen if you don’t have access to a large number of dancers, even if there are only two characters onscreen. The reason why multiple costume changes were needed is because a character might appear in two or more consecutive shots. For example: a series of shots edited together might show a group of three people having a conversation. We might see all three characters in one shot, then it might cut to one person in a close up reacting, then cut back to all three people, then back to that same person. If we reconstruct this, we need multiple dancers dressed identically, poised to jump into each consecutive shot. Then the film might concern itself with a different character and all the performers need to change into the relevant costume to prepare for these shots and edits. In our reconstruction, the costume changes took place outside of the performance frame. The costumes were designed to be changed rapidly and the actions of the quick change were choreographed so as not to distract from the action in the frame.

Our composers tried many different approaches to add sound to our project.

Eventually they gave up all attempts to connect with the drama. It didn’t work with the movement.

What worked was to reinforce the edges — the edits. They introduced a series of various hissing sounds that changed abruptly exactly on the edit point.

The dancers spent a great deal of time memorising the edits and all the action.

This meant that when they performed the live version the film was playing in their heads. This gave fluidity to what were, in effect, six different men performing fragments of one action in such a way that its shape, character and rhythm was retained across the “edits”.

It remained true to its cinematic source.

There are many insights to be gained from this investigation. As a choreographer and a dancer, it is fascinating to experience the rhythm of a sequence of edits physically, to understand the work of an editor in this way. This project made it impossible for me to watch films or TV normally for a long time.

They just didn’t make sense in the normal way. It was a couple of months before I could let go and just watch the news again, correctly.

Making Her Mark

MairĂŠad McClean

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Int: view into the library On a large table a map lies open with a compass, ruler and pencil sitting on top. A world globe sits on the cabinet behind, spinning. A bookcase covers the wall from top to bottom, filled to the brim. The dragging sound continues to dominate getting louder and louder as the sound moves closer to the image. An indistinguishable object, a flash of yellow/orange and a person pass closely by in front of the bookcase.

Ext: the schoolhouse A young woman wearing a workers’ orange hi-visibility jacket, hardhat and wellington boots opens the front door. She turns around and lifts a circle of rope and drops it over her body. She turns to pull something else with her. She struggles with it. She can’t get it out of the building. She goes back in again and manoeuvers herself into a different position. The awkwardness of the movement suggests what she is trying to lift is too big, too heavy to carry. The camera goes from interior to exterior from close-up to far away in an attempt to try and understand what the woman is doing. (…)

Int: in the kitchen The potatoes are boiling and bubbling away on the stove.

The bed covers are turned down as if someone has just got out of bed. The wellington boots sit at the back door, the hi-visibility jacket and hat are on the coat hooks in the hall. Waiting.

Int: view into the library On the table lie the Ordinance Survey maps. A compass, a ruler and pencil are sitting on top. There are now red lines drawn on the map. The world globe sits on the cabinet behind still spinning as if someone just walked by and set it spinning. A hand does just this, and the world spins again.

Fragments of script for Making Her Mark

by Mairéad McClean

Historically, land has been divided and subdivided for centuries for many different reasons. Some of the boundary lines have changed or shifted over time depending on how important they have become. Others have stayed the same. Fluid can become solid, it can alter or change its shape depending on the temperature of its environment. It can be transformed into something else. Elements that can retain something of what they where in order to become something new offer us hope.

There has been talk of a ‘frictionless border’.

Take the ‘less’ away from friction

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Fragments of research notes for Making Her Mark

by Mairéad McClean

and we are left with just that;

Frictionless border

= Paradoxical statement

The land border between Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, between the UK and Europe, has 300 major and minor crossings along a 500km border meandering through towns, villages, even houses. Around 30 thousand people cross that border each day. The idea of bringing the physical border back brings with it echoes of division and conflict from the past.

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PB

Boundary Post, Killeen

15th of June 1935

To: The Officer

Customs and Excise Exchange

Newry

I wish to state at 3pm on the 6th of June 1935 a man who was a passenger in a motor car and refused to give his name, had two boxes in which flowering plants were growing and when I told him that they were liable to duty he became indignant and nasty and refused to pay the duty of 1/6 which I demanded. I estimated the weight of the plants at 3lbs (duty 6d per lb) He said that I could take the plants as he would not pay. I forwarded the plants to the Customs House in Newry on the 7th of June.

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Respectfully T.W White

19th of June 1935

Customs and Excise Exchange

Newry

These plants were in a dying and valueless condition on receipt at the Customs House.

In my opinion their original value was trifling and it is not a matter of surprise that the importer refused to pay the 1/6 duty. Filed for reference if necessary.

F.T McMillan (Officer)

From General Register of Seizure 1867—1934, Public Records Office Northern Ireland

8 Live Cattle Seized in suspicious circumstances at Cloghoger (seen to have been smuggled at Drumloye) on lands rented to a P McMahon, who denied ownership. May be released for export to the Free State on payment of expenses incurred for their maintenance whilst under detention.

3 Live Cattle Found in suspicious circumstances 200 yards from Boundary on Upper Fathom, unapproved road with 3 men. Proceed against all named. Result of Petty Sessions: Each Convicted.

Total fine £66:18:9.

1 Live Horse Found in suspicious circumstances on the lands of J Clarke in a field adjoining border. Value of seizure £3:15:0, amount of duty to be paid £1:10:0.

Proceed to court under section 186 for penalty of £100.

Result at Newry Petty Sessions : Dismissed.

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10 Umbrellas Concealed in bus on crossing the border at Killeen Post. Value of seizure £6, amount of duty to be paid £1:10.

Goods to be retained as seizure to be sold at auction.

4 Bottles of Spirits Notice No 2 handed to passenger and a small quantity of dried fruit was declared. One bottle rolled out of ‘hold all’ during examination. Three bottles of Whiskey declared at a later stage as the parcel in which they were contained was about to be opened. The owner, although requested, declined to leave the train in order to see what suitable action might be taken. Mr Devenney, Co Donegal. Goods to be retained as seizure. Sold at auction Total: £2:0:6.

4 Pairs of Socks Packed loosely in a case with other personal effects 4 Pairs of Socks. Seized to secure duty (accompanied unreported).

Value of seizure 6.0d, amount of duty to be paid 1.2d.

To be retained as seizure.

From General Register of Seizure 1867—1934, Public Records Office Northern Ireland

Ext: country lane, dusk A woman and a girl are travelling by bike along a country lane as the day draws to a close. The girl, around 7yrs of age, sits on the back bike rack on a flowery cushion. The woman pedals. Her cycling seems laboured and she struggles with what appears to be a heavy bike and child.

Chain squeaks, mud squelches, the woman’s long coat slaps the frame. The bike tyres sink into the mud. The woman stops and beckons the girl to get off and run alongside the bike in the semi-darkness. A spray of white crystals starts to bounce of the back wheel cascading from the tear in the cushion. A sugary white line is drawn in the muddy road behind the bicycle disappearing in the setting darkness. (…)

Ext: border post, summer afternoon A hot summer afternoon, a car with four women sits in a queue of traffic at a border post. In the boot of the car, there is a cardboard box. Women’s voices loud in the car.

The car inches closer to the soldiers at the border post.

/ Sounds of shots being fired /

WOMAN (Northern Irish accent) What’s that?

SOLDIER (shouts, English accent) OUT OF THE CAR!!

/ Car doors are pushed open. Women get out and lie on the tarmac /

WOMEN (whisper) Jesus, Mary and Saint Joseph

/ Sound of more shots /

SOLDIER (shouts) KEEP DOWN!

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WOMEN (whisper, very quietly) Hail Mary..

/ Sound of more shots /

WOMEN (whisper, very quietly) Full of..

/ Sound of more shots /

WOMEN (whisper, very quietly) Grace.. the lord is

/ Another shot /

WOMEN (whisper, very quietly) with thee

/ Another shot /

WOMEN (whisper, very quietly) blessed Art thou

/ Another shot /

WOMEN (whisper, very quietly) Amongst SOLDIER Shush women.. shush… shush From underneath the car boot a yellow liquid seeps onto the tarmac creating a greasy puddle of melted butter.

The sun shines in the cloudless sky.

Fragments of Mairéad McClean’s family’s experience of the border, a script for an unmade film

The everydayness of the routine of marking territory, through the maintenance of the line, exhausted her: the outlining of maps, the production of notices announcing changes to crossing procedures, preparing new routes to avoid detection; listing the times to travel on one road as opposed to another, the mundaneness of developing the zones own national infrastructure, had to be endured.

She followed the path of the smugglers in the termination zone; the unapproved roads, the concession routes, the un-authorized pathways leading her away from the manned frontier.

In all weathers, in all conditions, somebody had to do it. The line had to be drawn.

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She thought the only true line on the map was between the land and the sea. There was an honesty that was shaped by the moon and the sun over time.

And time, and what happened in that time, changed the line. The sea level rose eating up the land and her world became smaller.

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Dutiful people carrying

dutiable

goods

GETTING ON WITH IT

GETTING AROUND IT

LIVING WITH IT

LIVING OFF IT

Fragments of voiceover for Making Her Mark

by Mairéad McClean

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* Richard Wilson’s Butterfly, 2013, The Wapping Project

Notes on a film shoot Making Her Mark

Marta: I’ve been trying to find you.

I met Linda.

She is on the same flight as us. Mx Thomas: I’m in the cab — might be too tight. I can’t believe it. XT Let’s see. It takes only 15 min to the airport. If not, try to rebook. The Flybe flight. There is one in the afternoon.

Ok. There is one at 8.55 from City, in Glasgow at 10:15 Let’s see How far are you?

West Silvertown The plane doors are still open Good news!!!

Just missed! I can see you downstairs! XT Marta, where are we flying to from Glasgow?

Benbecula.

Just landed in Glasgow Call you in a sec Waiting to get off the plane I arrive 1535 XT In Benbecula — I hope! ;) XT It looks like you have upgraded to a Cessna flight....

I hope its not Richard’s!! XT * I’m on board... same plane as on GdanskCopenhagen route..

I think I see you leaving on your propeller plane! … I’m trying to catch up! XT I landed, in Stornoway. The airport is smaller than the Power Station! XT …

Text exchange between Marta and Thomas, on their way to the Outer Hebrides. June 2017

The Islands of the Outer Hebrides are far from London on many levels. They are windswept, treeless and rugged bits of land in the expanses of the Atlantic Ocean north west of mainland UK. In June last year, we visited the islands for the first time to meet Andy Mackinnon of Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre, to explore possibilities of working together on commissioning and exhibiting a new piece of work, and to scout North Uist for potential filming locations.

Approaching the islands on a little, noisy, low-flying propeller plane, one sits between clouds. In the gaps opened up by strong winds, a rough landscape reveals itself. Gusts of wind hit the small plane as it dives down towards the tarmac.

There is no airport in sight. The plane taxis along the beach.

In the distance, waves are visible below the heavy grey sky.

This is not the uniform London grey; this one is much more dynamic and unstable, shades constantly shift and reconfigure. One arrives in little more than a corrugated metal shed and collects keys to a car from a woman at a café table to drive out onto a single track road.

These islands are much larger than the projection of the usual map of the UK suggests. Our little red hire car covers many miles on roads encircling and crossing the islands.

It comes to many near collisions with sheep resting on the roads’ edges or deer or otters crossing. There are signs warning of these specific dangers. The landscape is mesmerising with great open skies and the brief summer nights are inky black.

We go on a midnight after-dinner walk in soft, but still bright daylight.

One of us goes swimming on the Hosta Beach, as it is summer after all…

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On the way back to Glasgow and London, we leave the red car outside the airport, unlocked with keys inside, as instructed, and board the same little plane.

This time we are travelling together.

We return in late October. The autumn skies have more intense colours and are even more unstable. Almost horizontal sun rays shine in between navy clouds. It seems as if we have never seen these islands before.

There are now five of us.

Each morning, we pack cameras, spare batteries, film cassettes, memory cards, tripods, spare clothes, sandwiches, fruit, sweets, two flasks and a pencil into our two cars and set off.

Andy joins us on set with his neatly packed camera bags and cases.

Each evening, we unpack our two cars, clean the cameras and tripods from the omnipresent sand, dry the clothes, charge the batteries, back up the memory cards, wash the flasks and retouch the black tip of the pencil with blackboard paint.

We then sit around the huge dining table in Tigharry Schoolhouse eating raviolis from Co-op and drinking wine.

We repeat this routine a number of times until the film cassettes and memory cards are filled with images that will become Making Her Mark.

Notes on the film shoot on the island of North Uist, Outer Hebrides, during the making of Making Her Mark

by MairĂŠad McClean

Contributors Kapka Kassabova is the author of Border: a Journey to the Edge of Europe (Granta, 2017), Twelve Minutes of Love — a tango story (2011), and Street Without a Name (2008).

Her poetry collections are All Roads Lead to the Sea (1997), Reconnaissance (1999), Someone else's life (2003) and Geography for the Lost (2007). Her essays and articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Vogue, The Sunday Times, The Scottish Review of Books, and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, she was educated in New Zealand and now lives in the Scottish Highlands.

Tara Bergin was born and grew up in Dublin. In 2016 she received an Arts Council Ireland Literature Bursary to write her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (Carcanet), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and the Forward Prizes. It was selected as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and a Best Poetry Book of 2017 by the Times and the Irish Times. Tara now lives in the North of England and lectures part-time at Newcastle University.

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Lea Anderson is a director and choreographer born and based in London who has been making movement-based work since 1984. Lea trained at Central St Martin’s and Trinity Laban and received an honorary doctorate from Darting College of Arts in 2006. Lea is the founder and artistic director of The Cholmondeleys & The Featherstonehaughs dance companies, based in Bristol. Lea was awarded an MBE for services to dance in 2002. Lea was Regents Professor at UCLA in 2014, and is currently artist in residence at the Southbank Centre, London. Lea’s recent work includes Step by Step (2017), a commission by the British Council to create a large-scale, site-specific work on a pre-Incan burial site in Lima, Hand In Glove (2016) — a performed exhibition, at The V&A museum London and touring theatre production Ladies & Gentlemen (2017).

Mairéad McClean was born and grew up in Beragh, Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland, and has lived and worked for the past 25 years in London. She completed a Post Graduate in Fine Art at the Slade School of Art. She is an award-winning filmmaker who has produced work around the themes of memory, identity and migration. Her recent piece No More, won the inaugural MAC International Art Prize in 2014 and was acquired for the National Collection at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, through the Hennessy Art Fund in 2017.

Mairéad McClean’s Making Her Mark is commissioned and produced by The Wapping Project with funding from Women’s Playhouse Trust. The production of the work is supported through a Major Individual Award from Arts Council Northern Ireland with additional support from Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre. Making Her Mark will be exhibited at Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre in the summer 2018.

The Wapping Project would like to thank its Members.

The writing commissions published here were made directly possible by their generous and continued support.

The Wapping Project is a platform for risk taking and continuous development of ideas, thoughts and people. It is our investment in, and enthusiasm for, the artists that we commission that forms the backbone of the artistic programme. The Wapping Project questions and aims to redefine accepted boundaries through commissioning, nurturing and championing artistic talent.

We exist to enable artists to work with unrestrained ambition.

The Wapping Project (Women’s Playhouse Trust) is a registered charity N° 286384 Edition of 600 Designed by Atelier Dyakova Printed by PUSH, London

thewappingproject.org info@thewappingproject.org

Copyright © The Wapping Project and individual contributors and authors, 2018.

Image credits p. 6–7: © Marta Michalowska, Eastern Poland, August 2017. p. 21, p. 22: © Lea Anderson, Choreography Sketches. p. 26: © Marta Michalowska, Making Her Mark by Mairéad McClean, 2018, production still. p. 28–29: © Thomas Zanon-Larcher, Making Her Mark by Mairéad McClean, 2018, production still. p. 30–31: © Mairéad McClean, Making Her Mark, 2018, film still. p. 42–43: © Thomas Zanon-Larcher, Making Her Mark by Mairéad McClean, 2018, production still.

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