About The Long Ongoing MomentThe Long Ongoing Moment publication originated in conjunction with Outside, a 2018 sculpture and performance exhibition at Crossbones Garden in London, curated by Aubree Penney, Alexa Phillips, and Joseph Steele.
The Long Ongoing Moment takes its title from the included conversation with John Muse and incorporates both newly commissioned and previously existing works. Contributions pull from ideas explored in the project, particularly sex work, embodiment, death, absence, and memorials. Here essays meet poetry, text meets image, and the academic meets the personal. Rather than reify the boundaries between these, the publication attempts to break them down, putting them all on the same level as contributions and considering them all as valid ways of approaching the space. Intentionally, only a few of the contributions directly dwell on Crossbones. The works situate the space into a larger framework, exploring relevant theory and lived experiences as well as resonances with other sites, with each work opening up new possibilities for the others. The next issue will examine memorials in Memphis, Tennessee. Structuring History This project is concerned with the relationship between past and present and with the impossibility of relegating something to a history seen as being over when in fact it is continually repeated, reimagined, and reembodied in the present. Drawing heavily from Foucault in her consideration of duress via the lasting influences and residues of the Imperial in her book Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times, Ann Laura Stoler rejects the idea of both rupture and continuity, instead using a “recursive” construction of history (2016, 26). Here history twists and turns back on itself, revealing reiterations and re-embodiments of violence that persistently linger. While Stoler rejects the idea of haunting, contending that it overlooks the material damages and traces of colonialism and imperialism (6), I still found Avery F. Gordon’s use of haunting as a sociological methodology in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination helpful in terms of considering the relationship of the overlooked individual to history. She writes, quoting Horkheimer and Adorno’s note “On the Theory of Ghosts,” of “the ghostly haunt as a form of social figuration that treats as a major problem the reduction of individuals ‘to a mere sequence of instantaneous experiences which leave no trace, or rather whose trace is hated as irrational, superfluous, and ‘overtaken’” (2008, 20). Both recursion and haunting proved helpful in unpacking the endurance of what Joan Scott terms in her writings on feminist history “silent and hidden operations,” in regard to both non-male people and to overlooked groups in general (Scott quoted in Elam 2006, 69). The Long Ongoing Moment is heavily informed by the discipline of psychogeography, which with its emphasis on a complex, personal, embodied engagement with place proved helpful. As a discipline, however, it felt too grounded in a sphere of white heterosexual cis-male privileged mobility to support the non-male drive of this project. As a result, I opted to use myth and imagination to construct new boundaries of travel through which, even from within the relative safety of the graveyard, visitors might access a form of psychic wandering which addressed and celebrated queer and non-male bodies. Inspired by Linda Stupart’s idea of time travel through PTSD as well as the cosmic-geography-through-constellations of artist duo Krieder+O’Leary, I began to think more in terms of resonances, portals, and slippages. Alia Al-Saji calls the past “so close to the present as to be its lining” (Stoler 2016, 35). The Long Ongoing Moment snips holes in that lining, ripping it into portals in a search for a more complex understanding of our relationship to past and present. About Crossbones (Vol. 1 of The Long Ongoing Moment) Crossbones Garden marks the site of a mass graveyard which has existed near the banks of South London since Medieval times. Upon its closure as a burial space in 1853, there were approximately 15,000 bodies in the small site. Bodies were so packed in that upon archaeological excavation bodies were found a mere 6 inches from the surface. Most people buried were children and women, with many of the women being sex workers. South London has long been a hotbed of sex work; as Peter Ackroyd notes in London: A Biography, “There were attempts to remove the ‘mysguded’ from the more respectable thoroughfares of the city, by confining the women to the areas of Smithfield and Southwark beyond the walls” (2000, 372). The women here were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester to do sex work but were denied consecrated burial because of their occupation. After the graveyard’s closure, the lime mortar-sealed graveyard became the site of various constructions, including a fair, a warehouse, and a school. In the 1990’s, part of the site was dug up to build the power station for the Jubilee Line. Around this time, Friends of Crossbones began a program of guerilla gardening, befriending security guards meant to keep them out until TFL finally gave up, letting them tend the site. Transport for London owns the property and leases it to Bankside Open Spaces Trust (BOST), which oversees the space in conjunction with the Friends of Crossbones. Talks are ongoing regarding the possibility of an extended lease (Constable and John 2018, n.p.). References Ackroyd, P. (2000). London: The Biography. London: Chatto & Windus. Constable, J. and John, H. (2018). History – Crossbones. [online] Crossbones.org.uk. Available at: http://crossbones.org.uk/history/ [Accessed 3 Mar. 2018]. Elam, D. (2006). Romancing the postmodern: Feminism and deconstruction. In: K. Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 65-74. Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stoler, A. (2016). Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times. Durham: Duke University Press. About the Editor The Long Ongoing Moment is edited by Aubree Penney, a London and Dallas-based curator originally from Memphis, Tennessee. Aubree is currently finishing up her MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths College, University of London. This project is generously supported by MFA Curating at Goldsmiths College, University of London and Indiegogo supporters. |