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smog

​Smog was a deadly mixture of natural airborne moisture in the form of fog combining with domestic and industrial smoke pollution.
Peter Ackroyd describes smog as “perhaps the worst of all London fogs”.
Commenting on the nature of fog he cites Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. (1886) “ in which the fable of changing identities and secret lives takes place within the medium of the cities ‘shifting insubstantial mists’. In many respects the city itself is the changeling, it’s appearance altering when ‘the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths’. Where good and evil live side by side, and thrive together, the strange destiny of Dr Jekyll does not seem quite so incongruous”.
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The three short films that make up Smog reflect the ambiguous nature of London, glorious and dismal, natural and cultural, ancient and new.


‘The Miserable and Calamitous Spectacle’ quotes Pepys commentary on The Great Fire of London in 1666. The journey up the spiral staircase connecting the 17th and 21st centuries, the retribution of fire and water rising over a colonial city built on toil, seafaring, trade and combustion.


The Great Fire devastated the city but it also wiped out the plague that had become endemic in London over the centuries, and when conditions like weather and population levels of humans, rats and fleas reached critical mass, plague would erupt as epidemic. Again linking different epochs ‘Bubonic Video’ compares biological meltdown with the potential of electronic condensation and it’s cultural impact.


London’s territorial complexity is formed of a multitude of juxtapositions, these can be internalised within individuals and expressed in communities as conflicts and collaborations. Shot in the Back is an East End Western, pitching Willy and Dick together yet apart in a stressed out posse as art and business collide, merge, split and spin.



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