Looking back at an old post on Burnt Offerings today I am making connections about some recent research into property tours and urban exploration. What binds these two phenomena is the style of filming where a mobile phone or small handheld camera is used to capture the POV moving shot through the front door into each room. Property tours allow the potential tenant to view before they view for real, the estate agent is alone and moves around the house narrating the pro's of each room on site. A strange quirk I have noticed is where the toilet has a bow round the seat or loo paper has been arranged on the seat, presumably as a sign that the 'deep clean' at the point of vacation has taken place, and the toilet has not been used since. The urban explorer is usually alone too, predicting reasons vocally on site as to why the property has been abandoned, often finding photographs and papers left in a hurried departure. There is a sense of the devil may care as they move up to the second floor or into dark basements that makes me think that they are aware of their role as Blair Witchesque narrator. In both YouTube genres the consciousness of the camera as presented via a style of filmmaking that is familiar from the horror film - the POV shot from the perspective of the killer/voyeur. Property tours videos are varied, I've been looking at: unfurnished rental, furnished rental, hi end sale, low end sale, hi end holiday home and low end holiday home.
Most holiday home property tours make me feel sad as what they sell is a place to have 'time off work'. These brief glimpses of involved time: with children, cooking, reading, cycling are spoken of as impermanent holiday activities that must be made the most of. The subtext is that this is a dream that will disappear when you leave. They also suggest that they can provide your fantasy for the aspiration that is no longer even a feasible option as you struggle to make ends meet and worry about how you are going to pay for your children's education. These are aspiration holiday camps where you can play at being the ideal couples who drink rose and eat asparagus everyday of the week, at having the time to aspire.
Hi end sales are uncanny in their use of automatic opening and closing doors that lend these furnishings an animistic quality. I wonder how the maker of this video could miss The Shining references, I've lent a hand:
Then I couldn't resist this either, it's a cheap effect:
Not the first to perform a coloured light and music works live, but Mary Hallock-Greenewalt (1871-1951) invented machines, particularly the Sarabet, that she could use for her colour light art, that she called Nourathar, essence of light. Her inventions allowed her to respond in coloured light to music live, the first woman on record to create audio-visual performances perhaps. I enjoy the Crowley-esque title for her invention and the aesthetic of her set, high chair, long dress, psychadelic makeshift background. Here she is.
She also invented the rheostat, still used today as a form of resistor of electrical signals (volume/light). Her patent was disputed by General Electric but she spent some years fighting to be recognised as the lawful author for this device. She won.
Above is an example of her notation for a light performance.
Malmberget, Gallivare Municipality, a small mining town in Lapland, Sweden, is on the move again. The tunnels of the mine stretch for miles and have created a network under the town. Older tunnels have made the structure of the ground unstable to the extent that part of the ground started to cave in, starting in the fifties. Each year more of this residential area falls away into the mouth of Gropen, 'the Pit'. On the standard map, Gropen is represented as a grey, nondescript, mass. But the birds eye view shows a huge cavern. Not the mine itself, but what was the town, now a pit, gradually getting bigger.
Small posts, seismometers, stuck in the ground are dotted around the town. A fence marks off the area around the pit that has shown to be unstable by the readings. Within that fence are many abandoned homes. The people that lived there have had to move on.
Here is Gropen in the 60s:
And now:
Malmberget established itself as a result of high wages from mining work, it began to flourish from the 1880s onward. When Gropen became a danger, offices and houses were moved. But even these settlements and more around them are transient. When the mining companies (now LKAB, a state owned company) realised there was more ore under the town, and more danger of subsidence, they attained permission to enforce the removal of houses to nearby Gallivare. Some houses can be moved successfully, not all. The upheaval has been well documented.
I don't speak Swedish but I can tell from the facial expressions of the Malmberget residents in this report that they are sad to leave their homes. At one stage the woman in her kitchen looks perturbed, this is because everynight around 11pm the mine blasts can be heard, in this video the vibrations are visible.
Children's nightmares here, possibly, are not of a bogey man under the bed, but of the bed, and the house falling into the ground. To the east of Gropen are a hundred or more houses due for demolition. Gropen threatens their foundations and the owners have mostly packed up and gone. The abandoned, detached, residencies look recently vacated. They have been. There has been no chance for maintenance to lag. Paint is fresh on the walls, windows are boarded up, but others are in tact. Strangely no graffiti here, no break in, traces of teenage fires. Round the back of a house a chair only just has a twine of ivy growing round it. Gardens are yet to overgrow. The place has more of a sense of evaccuation than desertion. The reasons to leave are invisible, but the rumbling of explosions heard everynight from the mine, are a reminder. The blasts, to mine for iron ore, copper. Also, more sinister, and unexpected rumbles, small tremors are also reminders.
Walking through this area at night in the summer renders it even more strange. An unearthly light, midnight sun behind a clouded over sky. The dank, bleak emptiness met us with bone cold. Deserted roads, boarded up windows, silence. Intrigue and aesthetic interest was dragged down, indeed by the 'oppressiveness of the place'. This puts me in mind of Andre Breton's Mad Love (1937 Chap. 6), where he questions whether the oppressiveness of some places was due to their history, or whether some primordial, metaphysical presence 'made' people act immorally or despairingly:
As we gradually moved forward, the dismal nature of the site, which developed without changing in any sense, took on a poignant twist we could sense in our conversation, however increasingly vague...The presence of an apparently uninhabited house a hundred metres along on the right added to the absurd and the unjustifiable nature of our walking along in a setting like this. This house, recently built, had nothing to compensate the watching eye for its isolation. It opened out on a rather large enclosure stretching down to the sea, and bordered, it seemed to me, by a metallic trellis, which, given prodigious avarice of the land in such a place, had a lugubrious effect on me, without me stopping to analyse it. My gift of observation, which is in general not remarkable, was noticeably diminished by sadness.
Breton goes on to say that the walk between this house, across a stream and to a small fort gave him a sense of inner despair, and a rift grew between him and his lover. When he returns to his parents they explain that they had passed the site of a murder, a woman shot by her husband. He speaks also of the painting The House of the Hanged Man by Cezanne.
This is not just anecdotal: it is a question, painting for example, of the necessity of expressing the relationship which cannot fail to exist between the fall of a human body, a chord strung round its neck, into emptiness, and the place itself where this drama has come to pass, a place which it is, moreover, human nature to come and inspect.
He establishes, from his parents accounts, that the space between the house and the fort was 'the world' of the man, Michel Henriot and his wife, the site he and his lover had walked through earlier that day. He too had felt diabolically separated from his partner. Was it the site itself, the genus loci, that was the cause, or the gory details of the crime that had happened there that had made it so miserable:
Thus the space between these two buildings, which had been for me that afternoon such an exceptional place of disgrace, revealed itself in its very limits, to be the previous theatre of a singular tragedy.
