Revisiting a Vanishing Land

2022: The preliminary investigation

In 2006, the cultural theorist Mark Fisher and the writer, philosopher and sound artist Justin Barton undertook a topographical expedition along parts of the Suffolk coast, which led to the audio essay On Vanishing Land (2013). The title drew on Brian Eno’s On Land (1982). Eno grew up in the area and the landscape shaped him creatively.

The author’s (Revisiting a Vanishing Land, 2022) connection to this stretch of coast runs through formative years spent within the geography that clings to the grey North Sea, and through quarter Suffolk stock reaching back centuries. The once heimlich becomes more unheimlich with each return: more cars, more people, different dialects, less space, and the unsettling warmth of autumn days on a coastline that is quietly disappearing.

The futures imagined in pre-Thatcherite Britain have become a landscape of lost futures and nostalgic longing for a past that was itself partly imagined. In their place: surveillance, doublespeak, and the administered compliance of what Fisher termed market Stalinism. The lower classes once took their holidays at the British seaside, first organised by Thomas Cook in the nineteenth century through train travel, later by private car as affluence spread. Those same car owners can sometimes be seen today parked above the shoreline, staring outward at the sea, looking for intruders perhaps, or the future, or the past.

The dream of the seaside persists: to live there, work there, retire there, hide there. To find in it the homeliness that nostalgic memory promises. The coast is home to creatives and to those who have found their peace, but also to the under-employed, the lonely, the depressed, and the lost. Not all resorts are equal. Some carry the weight of broken expectations without ceremony.

Over a week in the unseasonably warm October of 2022, the author revisited a vanishing land, a moment of considerable political and social disorder in post-Brexit, post-Covid Britain, in which the spectres of economic, environmental, and psychological distress were present, if not yet fully surfaced.

Feelings, memories, readings, and news were collected and archived. The author listened, walked, filmed, and stole light. In the assemblage logic of hip-hop, the collected parts were deconstructed, collaged, and reconstituted: found footage, taken images, stolen frames, voices, folk tales, auras, and accumulated feeling, reconstituted into a filmic account of how land, sea, and people make a place of ghosts, and how those ghosts bear on the present and the future.

Fisher’s writing, composed a decade or more before this journey, runs through the film as its guiding thread. His warnings and observations return to the landscape that partly generated them, and in doing so take on the quality of prophecy. What began as a preliminary investigation has since become a practice-based PhD project at the University of Suffolk/ University of Essex.