My ongoing exploratory project titledThe Elmen Whispers and Other Tales shares conceptual common grounds with Georges Perec’s essays from Species of Spaces and Other Pieces 1 and Sophie Calle’s photographic project Suite Vénitienne 2.
My research was guided by multiple days of naturalistic and covert observations that not only provided me with key discoveries about my location: The Rose Gardens at Hyde Park 3, but also guided me to gradually localise my study to one specific Elm tree that piqued my interest. In the beginning, I observed the role of an ‘information gatherer’ who was primarily invested in collecting multi-sensorial cues from her immediate surroundings. Perec, through examples of practical exercises, in his essay on ‘The Street’ also emphasises on the importance of flat observation and note-making in gathering critical insights about a location or an object.
As the study progressed, my focus evolved from being an ‘information gatherer’ to an ‘information seeker’. My judgement of people’s behaviour patterns played a key role in the insights that I gathered from this phase. I questioned why people were, like me, drawn towards this particular tree that became the subject of my study. This runs parallel to the suggestion made by Perec to decipher one’s surroundings and question patterns and anomalies. This allowed me to accumulate a speculative map on the different paths of desires that would have led one to this tree. Perec’s work, thus, not only informed but guided the foundational processes of my investigative study.
As I dug deeper into seeking answers to the many questions I had about the tree, I found myself becoming invasive. The tree’s canopy created a private cocoon in a public park and by being inside the tree I felt like the tree had an unsaid ‘space’ for only one group, couple or individual at a time. I felt like a spy, documenting the movement of people and the conversations they had aloud. I began to question my role as an observer and felt the need to take a step back to allow the natural flow of events under the tree. Calle’s work mirrors this tension, that I experienced, between curiosity and intrusion. Her idea of research gradually assuming the role of surveillance closely relates to the thematic concerns of my project. I tried to emulate this feeling through interactions in my project output by inviting the reader to be invasive for a few moments and look beyond what they can see on a surface level.
As I stood back and looked at the Elm tree, I realised that I was not the only observer there. The tree itself has been an observer for ages, collecting stories wound in time that only the tree knows of. The tree became the observer that I, myself, ‘desired’ to be. I was merely a vessel through which the tree was able to share some of it’s whispers with the world.
Citations:
- Georges Perec and Sturrock, J. (1997). Species of spaces and other pieces : Georges Perec. London: Penguin.
- Calle, S., Dany Barash, Hatfield, D. and Penwarden, C. (2015). Suite vénitienne. Los Angeles, Calif.: Siglio.
- www.royalparks.org.uk. (n.d.). The Rose Garden in Hyde Park | The Royal Parks. [online] Available at: https://www.royalparks.org.uk/visit/parks/hyde-park/rose-garden.
