Mary Bouquet
We – Jos, Bryony, Lucien, David, and me – started talking about art and anth. But soon we decided to get out and go for a walk to find our dialogue through walking, looking exploring, with the necessary technology (digital video camera), our personal cameras, and David with the flash sound recording equipment. We did not have a preconceived idea: we went out looking for one. We went up the hill, in order to gain perspective on where we started from. As we followed the road, up through the fields, the houses becoming gradually sparser, the sky/light fading (DIMPSY), we saw things and we talked about them. Lucien was dragging his feet a bit. Bryony was energetic/enthusiastic. Jos totally into it; David buried in his furry recording equipment. The first person we met was Anna Grimshaw. Employing an echo of Soumhya’s Muslim beggars story we asked her where we might find an idea. She told us that ideas fall out of the sky and continued down the hill. We proceeded up the hill, collecting shots (the remote factory, the odd tree). Suddenly at the top of the hill at the fork in the road, there was a small man ‘directing the traffic’. He was working as a bricklayer rebuilding the house that collapsed on the hill opposite where a lot of bulldozing activity was going on. He allowed me to photograph him in profile (reluctantly); state of teeth permitting. When asked if we could come back tomorrow to film, ‘No. Ask Brian, he’s the boss.’
Signposting us the way, the obvious Irishman receded into the mist behind us. At the loop in the road, on the way up, there was a warm firelit cave/cafe/no, garage. In there, Gareth and his friend, with a fire, and two cars they were fiddling with. Jos is a natural ethnographer – we talked cars, medical, labour, and landscape histories – Jos filming, David recording, Bryony and Lucien mainly padding. Several – three times – we took our leave; three times we went back into the deeply, richly, textured new dimensions of the toolboxes, shrouded cars. Then we quit. Lucien’s feet were seriously troubling him, so the encounter with Brian had to be short. ‘What’s the idea?’ he asked us, contrary to the previous two encounters where we had announced ourselves as ‘looking for an idea’. The bulldozers and an identified number of men gouged away at the collapsed foundations, while Brian took us on: a dark figure, defensive, wary, able to parry us. ‘I know where you’re coming from … ‘Art an watta?’. We take our leave, return back down the hill. We have our material, we start to work it out. How the triptych emerged, took form, through the walk, the objets trouvés, the to-ing and fro-ing of the shape of the experience and the framings of meaning took over us, making these things produced new starting points: now art, now ethnography, open-ended.
