A portrait of the site as time [June 2004] is an essay designed for three data-projectors and six-speakers.
Addressing the semi-private garden owned by the Church of St. Edward King & Martyr in Cambridge, the project explored how a selection of people — two architects, a poet, the video-maker, the church, the homeless population that has adopted the space as a meeting place — inhabit the garden independently, and the social tensions that erupt when discrete uses of the space overlap. This process included visually mapping the area via video and digital photographs, an interview with the church Reverend, multiple encounters/interviews with the homeless community and research into the provisions made for said community, commissioning poet Marianne Morris to compose and perform a site-specific piece of writing, and collaborating on a script with architects Giorgos Artopoulos and Popi Iacovou.
The piece was imagined as a single video projection in the garden; but mid-filming a confrontation ensued with a man who regularly used the site as both bedroom and to entertain, who felt the project was usurping his place. As the installation of course hadn't been designed to evict, it was expanded at the last minute into an essay exploring the impact of locational art practices, and exhibited in the Cambridge University Department of Architecture.
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