Eleni Papazoglou

Commissioned as a response to David Haxton’s video piece Painting Room Lights (1981), 18/4120/PN2 is a piece of writing that describes the shapeshifting of Riverside House through the various activities that have taken place within it. Its trajectory from a council office building to artist studios and eventually, to residential space is described through autobiographical, anecdotal, and fictional experiences using language sourced from planning permissions, housing developers, studio practitioners and theoretical critiques of Haxton’s work. The text itself is addressed to David Haxton.

Commissioned by Ellie Dobbs n the occasion of Sheffield Doc Fest, Alternate Realities [exhibition] SET Woolwich

**********

You walked in here in 2006. It was a space that changed other spaces. It was a space where important things happened but not where important people were. Common people were. A space carved out for action on paper. And paperclips and hole punches and folders and lanyards Signs and annotations and applications and proofs of identification and tenancy and initial assessments and income. It made you feel invalid the moment you walked through the door. You tried to walk through the door the least times possible.

You love paper but hate fill-in forms. This place. You looked at the 13–story building and wondered if it was packed to the brim solely with paper. You thought it was silly but held that thought for a while. You called it paper tower and wondered what would happen when paper was not a thing anymore. Every lanyard had a 4:3 monitor in front of it. Pressed buttons echoed across the building. Digitisation was already pulling it apart.

South of the A206, you are queuing in the lobby. You are holding number 84 that a machine spat out for you. Mounted on the wall there is a screen playing government spots with images of the British countryside. The countryside bores you but screens excite you. You wonder how light and color arrange our most primal perceptions of what is and what isn’t.^1 Or , how could photography takes its own picture.^2  You are getting flustered by all this potential and some, and then someone calls your digits. You compartmentalise your thoughts on the dynamics of space and the indexical nature of the screen; and get on with stamps and signatures.

Riverside House is a Class B1a, agile and seamless: a design of the bureaucratic dream. It is glossy and white and it has no edges. Or at least, none where people can see. The floors pretend to be wooden and the carpet is an energetic yet congenial light green. Curved desks, curved staircases. If you remove the odour of boredom and that feeling of illegitimacy, it might as well be a cruise ship. The lack of music gives it away. Noises creep in: phones ring, glass doors slide, water dispensers bubble away.

Riverside House is a Class B1a attempt to luxuriating essentials. The sinking predecessor of the award winning gov.uk. for those with burners. The lobby lights are held up by space ships. It accommodates all shapes and sizes; they just have to fit into A4 folders. It is a place of flattening. It’s the portal to the index. Palatial and formulaic. Drenched in riverside light.

Riverside House is another eerie Class B1a that is turned into a maze of OSB panels and unorthodox activity. Most of the times you see no one but you can feel the multitude^3 locomote. Primarily in debris of sculpture gone wrong and paintings that landed in the bin. Studio clear out: it’s worth good cash but its too expensive to store. Ex-offenders walk though ritualistic installations about chimeras while dropping in for their probation meetings. The council still hasn’t changed its address on correspondence. There is nothing to do but welcome blurred edges.

You cycle through the lobby and get to your studio. You take some time to set up your camera. You decide upon your frame and press record. You think about relative space and its affordances. Your movements are poignant and full of intention. I imagine that back in the future we are sitting in your studio talking about your work. You work with essentials: light and paper, aka smoke and mirrors. Performative mechanics—solid motion; seldom stasis. You flatten, overlay, stack, distort. You are shifting space. Your actions are real and they form a parallel universe. You make me think we can carve out the spaces we desire. Don’t stop. In the chat we never had, I tell you you are performing essential work^4.

One point perspective: you are at a party in the bunker. It is filmed in negative. Pink light glows on glasses, skin, clothing. You want to get drunk but you still feel obliged not to, for this is still a place of labour. Ground floor: Exchequers, NNDR, Revenue Benefits Contact Centre. You feel edgy micro–dosing on ket while council fill-in forms still hang on the noticeboards. This is the epilogue of bureaucratic activity and you, a degenerate civil servant. You welcome bizarre co-existences even if they arrive through the most neoliberal mitigations. You wish it was otherwise but this is all you’ve got. It smells of cheap beer and everyone is working that countercultural casual^5 thereby reflecting fundamental requirements of national, regional and local planning policy for creating sustainable communities.

Our perception only touches the foreground. We cannot see any further: skyscrapers are being erected all around us. You don’t pay much attention. You are still concerned with essentials: light, space, time. So are the surveyors, the principal consultants, the aims and objectives, the reports. This light, this space, this time. One by one they are taken away from you. Seemingly unnoticed. Violent, luxurious speed. Maybe if you connected the portal with the index again things would be different. It’s too late: all rooms achieve the ADF target value for their room use. You are still filming in negative and you darken the room to lighten the mood.

It’s 2021, the world is falling apart and my keyboard is on fire. I need to email you. It is urgent even if we’ve never met—Dear David, I need your help. I need a new studio, and I was hoping that you can help me carve one out. In negative. Bleached in light. Paper tower is turning Class C3 (Planning Reference: 18 / 4120 / PN2) and I have nowhere to go. David, things loose their magic when they become infrastructure.6 Our ability to shift space, drench in light and bleach in chaos has become legislative. We come before the environmental and after the transport report. We are working against our own essentials, our own mechanics of survival. Time is running out and we will have to stop recording. Let me know if you can help. I look forward to your response. Yours faithfully, me.

I wonder if in a couple of years old schoolers with no smartphones would still walk in to ask for help with getting loans, or if travellers would reside in the parking lot. Maybe Cat’s humongous sculpture will still stand in the lobby—a memento mori for Russian billionaires. Maybe whoever lives here will have goosebumps—all the time.

I lie next to you on the ground. I can hear lorries reversing in the dark as they offload Lidl’s next day fresh produce. Don’t get tricked, it’s a scam. Paper tower is coming down and they’ve come to get us. We’ve built a fort in the penthouse office of the 13th floor. It is made out of carpet tiles, used up fluorescent tube lights and forgotten council paperwork. Someone brought that pink light from the bunker. The view from here is excellent. This is the prologue to 208 residential units, with accommodation mix as follows: 73 x 1 bedroom 1 person units, 59 x 1 bedroom 2 person units, 76 x 2 bedroom units. Opulent austerity. One child allowed—that will fit in an A4 folder. I wonder where your own sense of worldliness occurs.^6  You only fit in spaces of prologues and epilogues: in betweens, and temporaries. You practice being as becoming.^7 I can’t believe you bring this up now—we argue about Deleuze amongst the carpet tiles as we feel the floor crumble.

**********

1 Rand-Smith, Philip (1979) DAVID HAXTON, Arts Magazine [online], https://www.davidhaxton.art/arts-1979

2 Shapiro, David (1982), Inner City, Camera Arts, January/February 1982 [online] https://www.davidhaxton.art/pagela-1

3 The multitude is a concept of a population that has not entered into a social contract with a sovereign political body, such that individuals retain the capacity for political self-determination […] For Machiavelli and Spinoza both, the role of the multitude vacillates between admiration and contempt.

4 Essential work: During the Covid-19 pandemic ‘essential workers’ were defined as those playing an important role for the continued functioning of basic services – notably health services, social care, and food supply chains. I would argue that in times of heavy duty socioeconomic muddle, subversion is essential work.

5 A term nonchalantly created by Kris Kraus in her book I Love Dick that became an inside joke amongst friends

6 I wonder where your own sense of worldliness occurs* Shapiro, David (1982), Inner City, Camera Arts, January/February 1982 [online] https://www.davidhaxton.art/pagela-1

7  Becoming- is a concept proposed, amongst others, by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Becoming- is a process of change, flight, or movement within an assemblage. The process of becoming- is not one of imitation or analogy, it is generative of a new way of being that is a function of influences rather than resemblances.