Revisiting a Vanishing Land

2022

Summary

In 2006, the cultural theorist Mark Fisher (1968-2017) and artist Justin Barton embarked on a topographical expedition along parts of the Suffolk coast. This led to the creation of an audio essay titled, ‘On vanishing land’ (2013). The title was inspired by Brian Eno’s ‘On Land’ (1982). Eno grew up in the local area and was influenced creatively by the landscape (Eno, 2008).

Having spent my own formative years within the geography that clings to the grey North Sea, and being of quarter Suffolk stock, there is a connection to this land and sea from centuries of cultural and collective memory and childhood adventures, including the associated nostalgia.

The once heimlich is more unheimlich with passing years when I return. More cars, more people, different dialects, less space, and the uncanny warmer autumn days and vanishing coastline.

The futures that were imagined in pre-Thatcherite Britain have materialised into a land of lost futures and nostalgic longing for an imagined past. We now out of necessity, obediently, self-monitor and self-serve in this land of surveillance, doublespeak, and gaslighting. Market Stalinism in action.

Before low-cost flights arrived, the lower classes often took their holidays at the British seaside, first organised by Thomas Cook during the 19th century via train travel. Later, with affluence, private cars became the mode of transport. These same car owners can sometimes be seen today sitting in parked cars looking outward to the sea, with a fixed gaze. Possibly looking for intruders, the future, or the past?

The dream of many seems to be ‘the seaside’ - to live, work, or retire. Maybe to hide, escape, seek refuge, or have that feeling of homeliness that lives within nostalgic memory.

The seaside is home to populations of not only creatives and those that have found their place and peace, but also to many who have not. The under-employed, overindulged, lonely, depressed or lost. A landscape of broken dreams for some. Not all resorts are equal.

Over a week in the unseasonably warm October of 2022, I revisited a Vanishing land. In retrospect, it was a time of political and social chaos in post-Brexit, post-covid Britain. The spectres of economic, environmental, and mental distress seemed to be very present, if lurking below the surface of the country and populace.

I Collected and archived feelings, memories, readings, and the news. I listened, walked, filmed, and stole light to capture images as I undertook my expedition along the coast.

In the assemblage style of hip-hop music, the collected parts, of the found, taken, and stolen footage, the stories, folk tales, voices, auras and the feelings accumulated, were then deconstructed and collaged, and then re-told into an urgent filmic storm of how land/seascape and people make a place of ghosts and influence the present and future.

Ultimately, is it not the ghosts of all these interactions over time and within a space that creates the place? And is it not the place that then shapes the people that enter this aura-centric realm?

Mark Fisher’s words, theories, and thoughts, written a decade or more before, guide the narrative during the journey and film - the golden thread, perhaps. His warnings, theories, observations and fears ring like prophecies returning to haunt.