Signal Lost: the Space Beneath T
he series of pictures are part of a body of work of almost one hundred images taken over a period of three months around East Greenwich, London. They represent a particular aspect of the undergoing works of replacement of Victorian water pipes, and a possible backdrop of the regeneration of that part of London. The first thing I want to stress is the casualty of the subject as it became obvious after my son, aged four, started pointing out the signs, the letters, and the colours on the pavements to me. The signs are made by engineers with spray paint in order to map the invisible territory beneath our feet, before the actual digging starts. Whilst we would not normally stop and think about these strange marks on the ground, focused as we are on the delays to our daily routine caused by the road works, children have a different sensibility. Their embodied sensorial experience brings up small details otherwise unquestioned by adults' rationale. This made me think about the famous exhibition that the anarchist architect Colin Ward showed as example of children's perception of the cityscape ('The Child in the City', London 1978), in which room furniture was represented as three times the normal size (Paul Ritter's "Children's Eye View", 1959). The point was to reflect on how children experience the urban environment, as their acute sensorial experience and size make them closer to the ground and very attentive observers of the street pattern (floorscape).

As the visual research proceeded (and started becoming an obsession), it showed in more details (or better, hinted at) the intricate networks of pipes, cables, and wires that constitute the space under our feet in the urban environment. Where do all these links connect? To what extent can we still demarcate the boundaries of our private space of the home? How can we rethink the notion of natural resource, such as water, something that normally we would take for granted? What kind of embodied practice is embedded in the everyday use of utilities?

In one of my peers' feedback there was the suggestion of using the body of work as a metaphor of social connections, as they are less 'natural' (face to face) and more 'constructed' (virtual bodies and 'Second Life', mobiles and chat lines, the USB memories and so on).

At the end, there is a feeling of loss, uncertainty and almost despair as we are disturbed and perhaps unable to make sense of the vain attempts to map the stratification, both in space and time, of the myriad of networks and signals around us (as well as of their 'geometries of power' between local and global, embeddedness and disembeddedness, imagined and experienced, self-sufficiency and interculturality).