Parallallá - closeups of an exhausted plot
“The bridge becomes an aesthethic value insofar as it accomplishes the connection between what is separated not only in reality and in order to fulfill practical goals, but in making it directly visible. The bridge gives to the eye the same support for connecting the sides of the landscape as it does to the body for practical reality. The mere dynamics of motion, in whose particular reality the ‘purpose‘ of the bridge is exhausted, has become something visible and lasting, just as the portrait brings to a halt, as it were, the physical and mental life process in which the reality of humankind takes place and gathers the emotion of that reality, flowing and ebbing away in time, into a single timelessly stable visualisation which reality never displays and never can display.”
— George Simmel, Bridge and Door
Parallallá - Closeups of an exhausted plot is a Site Specific creation for the Greenland Dock Bascule Bridge, in Surrey Quays, London. The piece is evolving around the actions of three people reviving the beauty, history and structure of the site. In this 20 minutes performance the audience is invited to witness the activation of the space inside the frame of an exhausted engineering achievement.
The parallel cohabitation of Salter Rd and the block paved driveway of the bridge suggest a site of displacement. The present and past car access to "Redriff”. Passengers make this distinction clear walking in the tunnel connecting the shopping centre to the Greenland Dock walk is the busiest area. Passing underneath the bridge (where the water formerly resided) leaves the top structure unnoticed suggesting a space conversion, over and under instead of across. The travellers do not seem to respond to the 'visceral response to invisible directions embedded in the underlying plan' of the bridge, transforming our site in a mummified beautiful architecture standing only for contrasting the noisy Salter Rd with his immobile historical power.
This hybrid place in between utopia and heterotopia inspired the title of the performance Parallallá as a nonsense cohabitation of urban developments, past-present time, dynamics, visible and invisible. This site is connecting 'the finite with the finite' and at the same time suggesting a path to another life, or death.
Idea and development:
Nikita De Martin
Konstantina Tsagianni
Hyojun Seo