E9 BYE

Topographically speaking Hackney Wick is no island, though, sandwiched between the A12 and the River Lea, it often feels like one. This week we finalised our tactical retreat from London and broke down the print studio... just as everybody else was setting up the weekend's Hackney WickED Festival. We've met more great people in the final few weeks than we did during the two years prior, making it especially difficult to leave.
Occasionally popping to the Pearl for refreshments, we picked up some free papers as keepsakes. Issue 1 of The Hackney Wick skits on the vagaries of the area with cultural assessment from Iain Sinclair and local teens alike. The Cut is part of a broader project which takes an archival approach in mapping the area's socio-economic history (including Speedway, a few failed visions for the future and, ironically, Class War's resistance to gentrification) while simultaneously putting paid to the notion that successive generations obliterate the memory of their forebears.

Objecthood

You don't need to visit a museum to see the way humans invest objects with symbolic currency. An incorrigible hoarder, I've lately tried to penetrate layers of sentiment and see the useless tat beneath. The process puts me in mind of a 36-panel Chris Ware piece which tells the episodic, cyclical tale of a table lamp.



In the 18th century a literary style sprang up around this approach to objecthood, called It-Narratives. Anthropomorphic versions of these narratives tell the fiction "from the perspective of the objects themselves, others use them as hubs around which other characters’ stories are spun."[1].



• Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library #2, summer 1994

• Clifford Still, Lucian Freud (1922-2011), British Vogue 1948

Wishful Living

We were quite happy to be moving to an old post mill until a friend lent us the fantastic Converted Into Houses (Charles A. Fracchia, Thames & Hudson, 1977). Not only did we have to pack and shift it, it brought on a profound bout of space envy too. It consoles me that, almost like savages, none of these homes had an internet connection.

 

• Cigar Factory, New York (x2)
• Lumberyard, California
• Industrial Building, Paris
• Icehouse, Connecticut (x2)
• Cannery, Monterey
• Butterscotch Factory, London