Sebastian Lopez: In your installation you quote the story of Babel. You contrast this with a text by Paul Virilio where he remembers that the mayor of Philadelphia, after the black ghetto revolts at the beginning of the sixties, declared: “From now on state lines cross inside the city”. How did you articulate these two texts in your installation, and how does this version differ from the early one?
Keith Piper: The first version of 'The Exploded City' in 1994 was produced principally in response to the verdicts arrived at by the jury at the trial of the police officers involved in the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles. The decision not the find the officers guilty, even in the face of documented video evidence of excessive brutality, pointed to a complete fracturing of the fundamental logical systems which groups of people use to conceptualise the world around them. Hence the idea of the Tower of Babel as a mythical site at which a God so outraged by human collaborative effort at the level of language, and therefore at the level of the power to co-conceptualise, was deliberately introduced into the social sphere. In this initial version of the installation, the narrative of Babel was presented as a fragmented stream of text travelling across the multiple monitors of the installation. One's ability to read the text was alternatively enabled and then frustrated by the motion of other contesting elements in the video pane. The literal concept of Babel played out in the viewing experience. Against this background fragments of sound and news footage floated in and out of the audio space, complementing but never fully illustrating the theme of the piece. These fragments are re-activated in the more recent version of the piece, but presented in a different way. The central narrative around Babel is articulated through the use of a female narrator, who floats ghostlike on and off screen. The fragmented sections of her narrative become punctuated by a series of image and text juxtapositions, raising issues around surveillance, social control and the various mechanics through which the social, economic and physical Balkanisation of urban spaces is established and enforced.
SL: In your previous version of 'The Exploded City' you also brought in the 'virtual city'. Do you think that there is a relation between the 'exploded city' and the 'virtual city'?
KP: In many ways the relationship between both is akin to the relationship between the notion of utopia and the notion of dystopia. It is difficult at this historical moment to pin down the current meaning of the term 'virtual city' embracing as it does the concept of the landscape occupied by 'virtual communities': the communication channels, cultural and recreational spaces shared and enjoyed by a community of virtual citizens. The commonly shared element which still characterises these virtual citizens, is their access to the tools of entry into these virtual spaces, namely access to the still privileged resource of information technology. Bearing the initial entry requirements in mind, the architects and town planners of the virtual city, strive to construct and maintain a new type of utopian space, where privileged individuals can travel freely from resource point to recreation resource, consuming at will. This network of communication channels is the diametric opposite of the concept of the 'exploded city' across which transit and communication channels are deliberately severed in an attempt to Balkanise and maintain the separation between contesting groups, and limiting access to key spaces to the enfranchised.
SL: You restructured both versions with consideration to the city as a fragmented field. What kind of ideas about the city did you implement?
KP: Within the title of the piece, I am using the term 'exploded' in reference to the 'exploded view' of an object or entity, as in a diagram within which all of the constituent parts of a thing are displayed as separate. The advantage of the 'exploded view' is that it provides one with a set of analytical tools through which one can begin to understand an object, mechanism or space. In 'The Exploded City', I focus upon the fragmentation of urban spaces, the fault lines and lines of conflict, as a way of attempting to decipher a set of complex inter-relationships. These are the fault lines that separate individuals on the levels of race and class, and on the levels of access to, or exclusion from power and authority. Therefore focus of conflict within the piece is the relationship between young black people as individuals excluded from power, and the police force, as custodians of power.
SL: These mechanisms of power and control are implemented in different cities. Did you anchor your piece in the particular circumstances young black people level and experience these relations in London, or did you elaborate the piece from a wide range of experiences?
KP: This has always been a fascinating and in many ways frustrating issue. The piece is elaborated around a wide range of experiences, but those experiences have in the past been gleaned almost exclusively from black communities spread across the Anglophone world. In other words, in the UK we often experience and express a commonality of experiences to other black people living for instance in the USA, Canada and the English speaking Caribbean. In the past there has been a gap, or an absence of awareness of the commonality of experiences which we share with for instance, Francophone black communities, or people from the Dutch speaking Caribbean. What struck me most during a recent trip to my mother's birthplace, the island of Antigua in the West Indies, was how the island of Martinique was clearly visible across the sea, but there was very little exchange between the two communities. This situation has been replicated to a great extent between cities such as London, Paris and Amsterdam. Each contain huge black communities, but in terms of establishing a set of dialogues around the commonalties of a European blackness, we are still at a very early stage. In certain aspects of this version of 'The Exploded City' I would like to aim to those parallel experiences of fragmentation and dislocation which are felt as acutely in London, as they are in Paris, Amsterdam, Marseilles or Turin.
SL: But not only the black communities share the experience of fragmentation, dislocation and control in Europe. The Moroccan and the Turkish communities feel this too. I would like to stress that these issues, like control, are also experienced in other groups living in Europe.
KP: The intention of this piece is to specifically focus upon one key line of confrontation between the empowered and the disempowered. Not as a means of excluding or discounting other experiences of disempowerment, but rather to set up a metaphor through which a host of relationships and experiences can be examined. The point about Turkish and North Africans in parts of Europe can be expanded further to embrace the experiences of a wide range of groups. Specifically, in the UK, working class people in general are subject to a very specific form of policing. The largest non-white populations in the UK are people of South Asian descent, who themselves form a diverse mix of communities. Certainly, for instance the experiences of working class Bengali youths in the East End of London, very much mirror those of disenfranchised and racially disadvantaged young people across Europe, be they young North Africans in Paris, Turks in Berlin or Black youth in Brixton. My specific point in my previous answer was not to exclude these parallels, but to rather focus in on the present fragmentation amongst peoples from what is often described as the West African Diaspora. Also how the processes of different histories of imperialism, Dutch, French, Portuguese and English, have created a whole network of linguistic differences between communities of people who find themselves living in Paris, London and Amsterdam. Another example perhaps of the Babel complex. Also, within the installation itself, I specifically chose to make the central narrator figure a woman of South Asian descent as a means of decentralising the dialogue away from a straight dichotomy between the young black male and the policeman.
– Sebastian Lopez
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