The April edition of Crossing Lines featured two presentations.

Przemyslaw Polakiewicz premiered his film No Borders: Our Passion for Freedom. This was his representation of the walk undertaken in January this year by The Edge group of photographers.

This originated in Del Barrett’s Bleeding London project in which The Edge Group undertook to record the outer boundaries of the capital. The work undertaken there morphed into a collaboration with a group of students in Seoul, South Korea, and their teacher Jiwon Kim. Work from the Edge was exhibited in a collection of disused university labourites whilst work from Seoul was exhibited on the streets of New Cross-Deptford.

Gareth Davies

Przemek’s film is a record of the social practice that the January detour represented. It captures the connectives of the group in relation to each other and to the built environment as well as indicating the interconnectedness of the group in the social practice of walking-talking whilst responding to the textures of the images in relation to the textures of the built surfaces that were ‘borrowed’ for the detour.

The film presentation was followed briefly by an outline of the work of The Elephant’s Journey Group of photographers.

Steve Stewart

Gill Golding has spent time embedding herself in the evaluation of the Greenwich Peninsula evolution. ‘Evolution’ in this context is a polite term for engineered appropriation. The discussion opened with reference to ‘The New Architecture’ trope of the end-of-millennium ethos associated with Richard Rogers. Gill’s concerns are about the evolution of Greenwich Millennium Village from trailblazer to corporate representative.

Gill Golding

During its construction and opening the Village was viewed as a sensitive and innovation approach to mixed occupation within an historic space. The ditching of that aspiration in favour of Roundabout City speaks of the failure of custody of a history and a loss of communitarian aspirations. Greenwich Millennium Village is not the only site of the minification of millennium visions.

Report by John Levett