CINEMATIC
LANDSCAPE
EXCHANGE
Title: Fire or Flood
Institute: Architectural Association
Studio: Intermediate 7
The study of landscape involves examining complex relationships between human lives, natural environments and the timescales in which both play out. Sediments of meaning can be found woven into the fabric of the land: the thought, the dream, the memory. The extraction of this ephemeral value from empirical observation remains a central interest of INTER7. The unit uses film not as a system of representation, but as a tool to formulate a cinematic space that is a direct expression of duration. Film, in this context, becomes a form of active consciousness that can observe and process reality, suspend logic, resequence space, edit time and simultaneously formulate and unfold a landscape.
The Isle of Sheppey in the Thames Estuary has a unique and multi-layered relationship to time, through its geology, geography, history and its unsettling present. From the north coast of the island, it is possible to make out the three rusty masts of the SS Richard Montgomery, an American supply ship which sank in 1944 carrying 7,000 tons of ammunition and explosives. To this day, there remain enough explosives on board to spark a potential catastrophe that would be the largest non-nuclear explosion in human history.
In a letter to a friend, German writer Uwe Johnson – a resident of the island – described the wreck as ‘the one sight worth seeing’; a peculiar way to highlight its significance, because you can’t really see the ship at all. You have to think it. It is a story that has to be told. But perhaps this is also very fitting? The Isle of Sheppey has a peculiar capacity to express the interconnectedness of things; land, history and memory. In this way the symbolism of the wreck of the Richard Montgomery is clear: the past, as a future possibility. Or, as Johnson remarked: ‘either we’ll go down wet, or we’ll go up in a fireball’.
Institute: Architectural Association
Studio: Intermediate 7
The study of landscape involves examining complex relationships between human lives, natural environments and the timescales in which both play out. Sediments of meaning can be found woven into the fabric of the land: the thought, the dream, the memory. The extraction of this ephemeral value from empirical observation remains a central interest of INTER7. The unit uses film not as a system of representation, but as a tool to formulate a cinematic space that is a direct expression of duration. Film, in this context, becomes a form of active consciousness that can observe and process reality, suspend logic, resequence space, edit time and simultaneously formulate and unfold a landscape.
The Isle of Sheppey in the Thames Estuary has a unique and multi-layered relationship to time, through its geology, geography, history and its unsettling present. From the north coast of the island, it is possible to make out the three rusty masts of the SS Richard Montgomery, an American supply ship which sank in 1944 carrying 7,000 tons of ammunition and explosives. To this day, there remain enough explosives on board to spark a potential catastrophe that would be the largest non-nuclear explosion in human history.
In a letter to a friend, German writer Uwe Johnson – a resident of the island – described the wreck as ‘the one sight worth seeing’; a peculiar way to highlight its significance, because you can’t really see the ship at all. You have to think it. It is a story that has to be told. But perhaps this is also very fitting? The Isle of Sheppey has a peculiar capacity to express the interconnectedness of things; land, history and memory. In this way the symbolism of the wreck of the Richard Montgomery is clear: the past, as a future possibility. Or, as Johnson remarked: ‘either we’ll go down wet, or we’ll go up in a fireball’.
