Portobello

"Already thinking of a travel article, I noted the features of this silent world: the memory-erasing white architecture; the enforced leisure that fossilized the nervous system; the almost Africanized aspect, but a North Africa invented by someone who had never visited the Maghreb, the apparent absence of any social structure; the timelessness of a world beyond boredom, with no past, no future and a diminishing present. Perhaps this was what a leisure-dominated future would resemble? Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools." Cocaine Nights, J.G.Ballard, Flamingo, 1996. Photography arrests time but can as well capture the action of an already arrested time, i.e. a vacancy, a time immobilized even before it is captured, a dead time. The pictures of Portobello show us bodies in expected and satisfied poses, representations of a low cost popular culture, self-fictions of proletarian glamour. But they also show us places immobilized within town-planning and architectural projects whose expression refers more to the kind of organization and arrangement of a Luna park than to the construction of places to inhabit. Places to enjoy rather than places to live in. Author: Patrícia Almeida Texts by Ian Jeffrey, David-Alexandre Guéniot