The Passage

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U
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Hi everyone!

The place I chose to investigate is a small fragment of Haringey Passage that I live next to. Haringey Passage is basically a footway going through a residential area of row houses.

It’s this cute little path you can see here.

I live just next to the passage, I actually have a room overlooking the path.

You can see my window on the left.

As you might guess, I can hear every person passing by, all the small everyday dramas, kids going to school, conversations on the phone, bikes, suitcases, footsteps. It is rather interesting than annoying. Without going outside, just sitting and listening, you create an image of those people’s lives in the back of your mind (does it remind you a bit Plato’s Cave by the way?).

I wanted to look closely at those bits and pieces of their reality happening as they cross those few meters, and to give a fragmented image of what this place witnesses everyday.

I started from taking photos of people passing by at different times of day. Then made simple statistics like which way they were going, and if they were kids or adults.

Here is some data from Friday afternoon, spread over time.

The next thing was writing down bits of conversations.

I also had lots of recordings but didn’t really know how to go about them. No conversations were understandable but you could hear all different kinds of sounds that were a part of this place. I thought they could be illustrated better than by patapatapata for running and rrrratatatata for scooters in between conversations.

I wanted to be able to compare visually different rhythms. But then when I started digging into the audio files, I found some interesting sounds and melodies as well. Here are some attempts of illustrating them.

One day, when the tiles were damp, you could see some vague footprints, so I tried to highlight them.

When it comes to the tiles on the footway, I also took a photo of each stone tile, made the topography and colours come out, then put them back together in the original layout.

So in the end you get an image from above of those few meters that people walk through everyday.

The last thing is the close ups of materials on the walls closing the space from both sides as you walk along the passage. It creates a kind of a mood board of the place (on a sunny day) and resembles a soil cross section which really fits the feeling of walking through a canyon.

That’s it. Thanks for your attention 🙂

Best,

Marta