Through Blackened Teeth
The science fiction writer William Gibson once noted that the future is already here – it just isn’t evenly distributed. Nobody is sure of when or where Gibson first made this observation and a search of the internet reveals a number of different wordings but the point Gibson was trying to make was that technological advancement is subject to the same economic forces as everything else and the inequalities of our system mean that when the future does eventually turn up, it finds itself sandwiched between traces of both the past and the present.
I have this quote in mind every time I visit the town of Hastings in East Sussex on the South Coast of Britain. Like many British seaside towns, Hastings has a pier and a promenade littered with places selling sticks of rock or fish and chips. However, make your way down to the end of the promenade and you will a collection of tall, black wooden buildings that are absolutely unique to Hastings.
These buildings (known locally as net shops) were once ubiquitous on Hastings’ beach. They are used to store fishing nets as Hastings is home to the largest beach-launched fishing fleet in Britain. The story of the net shops is also the story of Hastings as the town’s slow transition from fishing village to tourist destination has seen centuries of (sometimes violent) confrontation between the interests of local fishermen and those of local landlords. Once the net shops were everywhere, now they are wedged into a car park sat between an art gallery and an aquarium
The net shops are the stuff of history and relics of another age; their design unchanged for centuries, their building materials hopelessly outdated, their presence harder and harder to justify on economic grounds and yet, decades after humanity stopped going to the moon, the net shops still stand. They are surrounded by traces of both the present and the future, but these remnants of the past still stand.
This ongoing project entitled Through Blackened Teeth is about the way that the present and the future flow into being through gaps left in the rotting remains of the past. It is about the violence of the collision between historical eras and the way that past, present, and future are pressed up against each other and forced to co-exist.
