YUKI JUNGESBLUT
THE PARK #1
CASE: BLOW-UP, 1966 (M. Antonioni, (J. Cortázar)) LOCATION: Maryon Park, London DATE: 15th June 2016 ACTION: A Walk through a Park NOTE: Between past and present and between film, memory and imagination
– READINGS – The Zonographic Society
– READINGS –
THE PARK #1
Yuki Jungesblut The Zonographic Society
CASE BLOW-UP, 1966 (M. Antonioni, (J. Cortรกzar)) LOCATION Maryon Park, London DATE 15th June 2016 ACTION A walk through the park MODE Out for evidence NOTE between past and present and between film, memory and imagination
park `pärk \ noun [Either from Fr. parc, L.L. parcus, a park (from L. parcere, to spare), or from A. Sax. pearruc, a park (whence paddock).] 1 a: an enclosed piece of ground stocked with game and held by royal prescription or grant b: a tract of land that often includes lawns, woodland, and pasture attached to a country house and is used as a game preserve and for recreation 2 a: a piece of ground in or near a city or town kept for ornament and recreation b: an area maintained in its natural state as a public property 3 a: a space occupied by military vehicles, materials, or animals b: parking lot 4: an enclosed arena or stadium used especially for ball games 5: an area designed for a specified type of use (such as industrial, commercial, or residential use), amusement parks Merriam Webster Online (2017) in combination with The Consolidated WEBSTER Encyclopedic DICTIONARY of The English Language (1967)
THE APPROACH The point of departure for THE PARK I is Michelangelo Antonioni’s seminal film BLOW-UP from 1966 with its photographer protagonist and underlying questions of what constitutes truth and reality. In the film it is the park where the photographer chances upon a couple of which he takes photos, where he (via photography) possibly discovers a murder and where in the end he manages to hear the sound of an absent tennis ball. Initially the photographer goes to the park to kill some time and he does this by readily entering a state of play – chasing birds, taking pictures, taking pictures of love birds, following his impulses. In the narrative of the film he revisits the park twice, once at night – without his camera – seeing a corpse lying on the grass, a nightmare of his impotence, and then again in the morning, now with his camera, but there is no body to be found and instead a troupe of mimes plays a game of imaginary tennis leading to the film‘s famous ending with its double vanishing act. Taking these events together somehow it seemed to me that in the film the park serves as a symbolic space of transition or inbetween but also as a space of challenge. So essentially despite all the action in the photographer‘s studio, in the darkroom, the restaurants, the parties, despite all the glimpses of urban swinging London, the desolate views of the less privileged, ironically it is the harmless park which becomes the existential stage for a solitary person.
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Some strange afterimage lingers of this rather ordinary park in BLOW-UP and returns to memory. It is not quite clear though what that image is. In my mind it is a moving still image. Something happened, but may be not. In 2016, 50 years after the film was released, I visited Maryon Park in Greenwich, London, where the film was shot. My questions were open ended. What would I find there? What does it look like? What does it feel like? Would there be some resonance to the world of the film? Can you find traces to reconstruct a memory (effectively of something that has never happened)? Would there be some connection to that world of potentiality that fiction offers? The following gives a primarily visual documentation of that encounter and plays more with the come what may attitude of Thomas, the photographer in BLOW-UP rather than carefully reconstructing camera angles and montage of the film. It is what the roaming eye found in (and around) Maryon Park – some landscape and some other stuff. It is open to interpretation.
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THE WALK
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The wind still blows in Maryon Park. The grass is green.
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THE DEPARTURE
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And so? Any evidence? Evidence? What evidence?
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The birds have become more colourful.
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This publication appears as part of READINGS, an ongoing research project that explores the fringe territories between fiction, reality and the imaginary and that takes its title quite literally. For this series works of literature or cinema or an interest in a particular author serve as my guides when visiting and investigating their related settings and sceneries in the contemporary real world. These visits form the basis for a new work in dialogue with concepts, moods or patterns from the original work. This inter-textual project looks at questions of collective and individual memory, desire, imagination and longing and currently relates them to a quest to re-imagine and contextualise romanticism (and Europe). By excavating the forgotten and juxtaposing it with the remembered it seeks access to a space of potentiality and possible fluidity that is needed for re-invention.
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Imprint: Turtlelab Press c/o Turtlelab Berlin Schwedterstr. 262, 10119 Berlin, Germany www.yukijungesblut.net Published by: The Zonographic Society Concept & Photography: Yuki Jungesblut, London 2016 Layout: Zonobuero Printing: dbusiness, Berlin Pre_Edition: 4 Copyright: (c) Berlin 2017 Yuki Jungesblut
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