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The October meet-up of The Crossing Lines Group at Goldsmiths was a strange affair. The evening began with a we-have-been-here-before failure to connect. Fortunately the failure was IT (and Levett’s failure to check it out earlier in the day) and the fortunate side of that was the foresight of Anita Strasser to carry her laptop with her.

Once the effing & blinding had wound down the evening began.

asAnita Strasser

Anita Strasser’s fresh project is located within the communities of the Austrian alps. Anita has form when it comes to long-term projects in very clearly-defined communities (check out her recent Deptford project). The new work surprised with its breadth and the closeness which Anita has established with the small communities of this multi-faceted region. The project is on-going; the quality of the print-work is timeless.

 

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Claire Reddleman

 

Dr. Claire Reddleman & John Levett are collaborating on a project to be presented at this year’s Urban Photo Fest at Goldsmiths.

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John Levett

The collaboration centres upon Kate Atkinson’s novel ‘Human Croquet’ and its ideas of historical layering & correlations of past & present & urban-rural boundaries & how the present contains the past & contains it’s own addition to a history. Trees feature heavily. Why is that? Claire’s work-to-date is vibrant & full of the potential for story telling. More follows at the UPF.

Peter Luck provided a coda on an ‘event’ in New Cross High Street viz. an exploding wartime bomb that narrowly missed his mother. We are all grateful for the miss. The short piece raised questions of collective & personal memory & how these are retained & layered within a transforming urban landscape & multi-memoried locality.

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Peter Luck

 

Here are Peter’s own words:

On 25th November 1944 my mother left home in Nettleton Road, on the other side of the station, and set off for the Woolworth store. As she walked up the western slope towards the station a V2 rocket fell causing the collapse of Woolworth’s and killing over a hundred and sixty people within and close by. Had she left home two minutes earlier she might well have been one of them. As it was, I think she played a small part in the rescue operations, something she was unwilling to say much about. I was born in 1946.

In this locality a similar story could be told by quite a few people of my generation. It is both family history and communal history, something specific to an understanding of the place. The photo and others like it may help place the spoken memory – before the reminiscence retreats to the archivist’s files or becomes vulnerable to the dangers of mythology. Here. Now.

The next Crossing Lines meeting will be on 2nd. November at 6pm. The LIP Seminar at Goldsmiths will be on Tuesday 8th November at 3pm.