Natural Habitat
April 2005, Manchester
The BBC has a number of Big Screens around the country and the screen in Manchester is used to show not just sport, news and major events, but also artists’ moving image work. I was commissioned by The Bigger Picture on behalf of Cornerhouse to make a new piece in response to the area around the Big Screen in Exchange Square. On visiting the area at the weekend, I was struck by the number of young people who hang round there, not really doing much, just hanging around. It’s not just a handful of young people either, there are loads of kids and this can seem quite overwhelming.
I wanted to take a closer look at this group and get a sense of who they were and why they were hanging around there, so I spent time filming and hanging around myself. It became apparent to me that there was a great deal of movement within the group: people skateboard, attempting Parcour, gently swaying as they linked arms, and I wanted to capture this. I took my film footage and kind of choreographed the movements I had found and emphasised repetition and motion. In keeping with the locality, I used a piece of music by local band Fingathing.
This work, along with work by the other commissioned artists, was shown on the Big Screen throughout April of that year and has been shown a few times since.
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