A city-image hovers
on the brink of a river, a face peering at its own
reflection: a fractured body; limbs of concrete and feather. Electric-arachnid
eyes record all and paranoia traces accumulate. The city explodes
and reforms 25 times per second, entropy eroding the frame rate
in slow motion.
The two sections of the title, ‘Rising Terror / Rising Damp’
refer to two distinct time frames at work within the city. The first,
Rising Terror, exists as a threat of destruction within Liverpool
as a historical, economic city. It targets the superstructure of
overt power symbols such as St John’s tower, the two cathedrals,
the Liver and Cunard buildings: the famous skyline of Liverpool
where only the peaks are of importance. These buildings either are,
or represent the powerhouses of Liverpool in terms of trade, tourism,
religion – the powers that hold a city together in relation
to the rest of the world, to a larger political, economic structure.
Rising Terror is an idea of ruptures in that particular fabric,
operating on a small, almost instantaneous time scale: a virus corrupting
a system, a bomb destroying a building. An idea of the precariousness
of the monumental and the processes (terrorist in political, or
biological ways) which enact these ruptures. It is about the vulnerability
of the ‘face’ of a city, the landmarks where the public
eye falls and is directed to and the problems involved in this being
an image dissipated geographically across the city and divided between
different architectural forms as opposed to the instance of the
straight forward relationship between an architectural façade
and the proper structure that lays behind it..
Rising Damp works on a time scale more akin to that of a ‘natural’
lifespan, be it human or architectural. It takes up as an idea the
entropic nature of matter, and applies it to the central and periphery
structures of the city, which show an amazing amount of entropic
evidence, something that most cities are keen to relegate to the
ghettoised areas only, where urban decay is permitted and expected.
Liverpool, however, does not seem to have the economic backbone
to keep up any such pretence (although perhaps the ‘Capital
of Culture’ will transform the city into a ‘normalised’
being).
The city has many layers, or strata, of history which are exposed,
becoming exposed or being overwritten as the flux of everyday life
washes through it with slow powers of attrition. It is as though
Liverpool has a tough ‘vital’ force but it is one in
short supply, one bound up with poverty. Rising damp is an idea
of how this slow time frame, of attrition, absorption and dispersal
(under the general banner of decay), the process of which is undetectable
at a basic time-bound experiential level, and is therefore much
more insidious and affecting, is an inextricable part of the city,
one that is continually ‘hidden’, but one that is entirely
inevitable.
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