Where once we walked. MARK PETER WRIGHT
(Another Space 2011)
“Where once we walked” is Mark Peter Wright’s commissioned specific ode/tribute to child survivors who escaped in extremis from Holocaust by being harbored in Cumbria (Lake District), in Britain on August 1945. For this heavily connoted subject, he gathered location recordings from their polish homes & surroundings, mounting them afterward in an efficient “cinema for the ears” collage ” reflecting an intimate walk back to source, a step into the past to perhaps have more hold on the present…
Taking common ground ingredients, and tapping into collective memory, he manages to inspire naked emotions on edge…
“Where once we walked” opens with church bells ringing, fading into a liturgical ceremony, a choir of angels whose voices thin gradually down leaving only a trail of vanishing words…
Then Nature quietness comes in, letting off what seems like the sound of water gurgling into pipes or gutters…the echo of a train in the distance…stopping,…heart still…people talking : life !, punctuated by some faint metallic sighs…When a beautiful Jewish song raises, one gets the creeps, thinking of all the broken fates & bounds…rain spits…thunder…noises of assembling wagons & transport…bells come back like an omen…people working : life !, disturbed by a ticking old clock which ends up donging…a brief return in church reverberating space abutting onto the rustle of loose leaves and trees swinging in a slow breeze, the singing of birds… when a loop of the initial ceremony comes to the surface again, it serves as prelude to a sort inevitable final goodbye, steps losing themselves into the thick night, nowhere…
By the alternation of different planes, the contrast between the transient & immutable, the evocation of presence through absence, Mark Peter Wright electrifies our imaginary, and at once, a note, a sound, a fragrance, a voice linger in the air meaningfully.
“Where once we walked” underlines also an irrational belief that I’m rather partial to : the fact that our surroundings keep active traces & memories, and that there’s perhaps life behind the inanimate…
Take that walk, and quivers…
– Daniel Crokaert
