Project: Found Wanting
Dates : November 27, 28, 29, 30, 2003
Location: East End (London)

e-Xplo
found wanting

click here for more information on the script and to download a pdf version of it

27-30 November 2003, 8:00pm & 10:00pm
Bus tour with live sound performance, East London

Curated by Lucia Farinati

New York-based collective e-Xplo devises topographical projects using bus tours as a method for researching and exploring urban landscapes. For the first time in the UK, e-Xplo presents found wanting: sometimes I tend to monumentalize things I see, a newly-commissioned project for East London.

e-Xplo transforms a ride on a tourist coach into a navigable cinema. A carefully mapped route of over familiar, overlooked, or marginal spaces is blended with a live soundtrack made up of layers of field recordings, musical compositions and audio fragments.

found wanting navigates and interrogates the geographical, economic and social borders of East London beyond categorised definitions of the East End.

Through a process of field research, found wanting re-maps and over-scores previous mythologies, histories and other traces, traversing gentrification frontiers, regeneration schemes, industrial zones, and less well-defined frames. Suggestive rather than prescriptive, e-Xplo combines the spectacular nature of touring and a cinematic format with multiple layers of fictional narrative and collective memory, creating fragmentary journeys through city space.

Two tours departed nightly at 8:00pm & 10:00pm
From Whitechapel Art Gallery, 80-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1
Nearest Tube: Aldgate East

_______________________

The Script:

click here to download text


Found Wanting: Vertiginous London served as the narration for the East London tour. The text was read by Adam Bowman. The idea emerged through extensive reading and research, exploring the layers upon layers of discourse surrounding and enveloping the city of London in general and East London in particular. Rather than attempt to make sense of all the material in a direct or orderly manner, the strategy was instead to allow London to appear embedded within its fog of history and folklore, both forgotten and remembered, trashed or reclaimed.

We remixed some of the texts we found to be interesting and most related to our tour, gluing it together with original texts, texts that were inspired from our own time in the city, text from advertising along the route of the tour, text spoken by people we met or interviewed.

The entire script was divided into “tracks”, broken into short fragmentary lines, sometimes words, and even silences, and each night placed into random order and played in a different sequence than the night before. What emerged was an unordered narrative rendering of a city, new, unique each night, a vertiginous London, half emboldened, half weighed down by its history, and sometimes most alive inbetween the cracks and silences in the narratives.