Esther Planas

Copyright 2023

Film:
Walking on the whereabouts near my place, with a sound artefact and a small camera, the desolated field and the special totem that holds a whole building with its concrete anima are all manifesting calling up for rebellion. Sound and field recording of a somehow unresolved situation.

Photos:
Walking urban research, a series of photos taken between 2011 and 2015, an ongoing journal of walks around the area where I live, the same buildings that I see from my window, the streets, the estates I cross and how they are becoming derelict, the casual gardens, the plants and flowers, the birds and squirrels.

Text: A series of texts of dreams and impressions during the walks become a Journal, which was published by Blauer Hase, Paessagio in 2014.

East End Walk About:

Filming and photographing as performative relationship around encounters with totemic or animistic presences that produce traces and manifest themselves. The daily walks and routes through the neighbourhood in the East of the city of London, the encounter and the call to be located in specific spatial coordinates from where to negotiate the street, the forms, the space and the buildings.

Parts of the concrete block that generate attention. They leave traces in the digital space capturing the field. The unit meets another one and is reflected when they coincide. A column, a body. The eye, the objective. The field, (land/territoire) and the space/time through which phenomena transits as symbiotic entities. A language of study and urban perception is established where the buildings and their messages are heard and recorded from areas threatened by gentrification and brutally unfair speculation.

Why are these moments a resistance if they are seemingly isolated? What happens with the anxiety that is perceived before the next alienated?

Filming, possessing, or passing by, stopping to listen to each sign, the message is from this supposedly silent blocks.

It is the time and social space that speaks.

The manifest in the digital plane that captures that time-space, echoes a conversation between atomized entities that meet and recognize each other as equals.

It is exile, not being British, not belonging, what pushes the search and exploration.

Since, also, the figure is transformed in reverse, into that of the immersed explorer, the ethnographer-anthropologist archetype, who points and discovers what oppresses him.

By revolving the Anglo-centric order, by decentralizing it in its very own territory of origin (London, metropolis, heart of the imperial city, the monstrous capitalist hub) in the area where its sub-servient slaves and the alienated immigrants (coming from its yet colonies and its ex-colonies) live a constantly menaced life.

What is the relationship between various possible languages by physical gestures of movement, pause, and stillness in these encounters?

It is empathy, recognition, and in particular the principles of attraction activated between surprised elements found as related or exotic.

An analysis of the approach and disintegration of bodies or entities and the ways in which these proximities inflict sense and awareness.
In a study, with a methodology of the field-based, it is the time dedicated, the attention to the discourses, to the social conditions and to the temporal rhythms of this whole process that are revealed.

The Hermeneutic gaze as in a floating position before a talismanic territory from which to act in the present.

ephemeral friends from hood
nice encounter
ephemeral friends from hood 2