LITO APOSTOLAKOU

LONDON ROCKS is a comment on history writing and the ways the past is collected, preserved, remembered, constructed, written about. ROCKS were photographed and sound was recorded in the vicinity of a bridge of tidal River Thames at low tide. 20 bridges were selected as locations. Every photograph was traced under a magnifying lens, imprinted with historical or/and literary texts linked to each location, and placed in a box. Each box in the installation bears the name of the River Thames bridge where the rock was found and sound recorded. 

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The River Thames is an archive of remnants and fragments, that attest to the reality of the past, but can never recover the past. The rocks become sites where the past is re-enacted in textual and material form. In the photographic portrait of the rock, the physical object is absent - it was only witnessed for a limited time and then lost in the multitude of stones dislodged by the tide. LONDON ROCKs interrogates the ways historical knowledge is transmitted: through selection, classification, imposition of meaning, "immersion" in the past via claims of authenticity, written proof, verisimilitude. The end result is not the recovered past but a narrative that makes sense in the present. 

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