Design Myles Quin, BLU, 2010;
130pp, four-colour, softcover, limited edition of 100, numbered and signed
The art-deco lido in Brockwell Park, South London, is much more than just a swimming pool: it’s Brixton’s beach, and on a summer’s day all of South London is here in all its many guises. Memories… set out to celebrate this unique space, the people who bring it alive – and the enigmatic substance that draws them here. Via hundreds of informal interviews in the streets, parks and shops of the area gethan&myles encouraged locals to share their ‘memories of water’ – in all its forms (rain, sea, snow, ice, lakes, baths, amniotic fluids, fog, flood, tears…). Having edited and assembled these memories, we emptied the (Olympic-size) pool and painted the words on its walls. For six months people swam through the memories of fellow users or members of their community.
The book is a deliberately tangential and conceptual document of this installation. The reader is invited to approach it like the pool: dip in; splash around (no heavy petting and no bombing please) and / or do ‘lengths’ (by reading the right-way-up right-hand pages to the ‘end’ then ‘tumble-turning’ the book to return on the new right-hand pages; for as many lengths as one likes). Each page is a response (poetic, scientific, photographic, sculptural, graphic) to one of the memories. The six chapters, and the words and images within them, correspond to the water cycle (suspended water, precipitation, rivers, domestic water, sea, evaporation) and the pagination is based on the tides (where the middle point of the chapter is high tide). The entire collection of all the participants’ memories flows along the bottom of the pages. Guided by its aqueous inspiration Memories of Water is fluid and non-linear, a cyclical book with neither beginning nor end.
