Between Where We Are And Where We Want To Be

Extract from an unpublished essay written by Sally O’Reilly in 2008, reproduced here with the permission of the author.

"Let’s take a walk in Birmingham in 2005. We’ll walk through the crowded precincts and pavements, indistinguishable from all the others walking between their own personal As and Bs. Except for one person who stands out: a young man carrying a placard. He also seems to be travelling from A to B, neither loitering nor pacing back and forth, but walking with deliberation, direction. The placard declares, in a 1960s style typeface: Between Where We Are And Where We Want To Be. The placard seems tautological in the most mundane way. Yes, if we are on the street we are, most likely, between destinations. But hold on, how can we be between where we are and where we want to be? The placard seems to be projecting its bearer and the reader into a very near future, but a future nonetheless, where we are no longer ‘where we are’. The time that it takes to read the placard is indeed an infinitesimally short period that shunts us from now to a new now, but this time-travelling mechanism of language is not one that we generally admit into our everyday comprehension – that would be both pedantic and confusing. Instead we tend to allow language’s framework of temporal reference to be dictated by its internal context rather than the literal mechanics of writing, reading or speaking. So if we read ‘I am leaving the building right now’ we take this to be happening in the ‘now’ of the narrative, not the ‘live’ now. However, in Between Where We Are & Where We Want To Be Simon Pope renders the gap between language and the world ambiguous. Here direct action is insinuated, through the language of the dissident and aspirational placard, not in relation to an identified cause, but is instead suffused obliquely through the fabric of the city and the consciousness of its inhabitants. Pope’s mode of dissemination has more in common with the Situationists’ dérive than dissident demonstration: the cause remains unidentified, the effect somewhat intangible. And yet this ambiguous meander has become an increasingly distinct strategy in his practice until it has, paradoxically, assumed a purposeful direction. Walking, as a near-universal human activity, underpins a number of recent projects, both as a means to develop socio-political content and a form through which to express, produce and disseminate it..."