All words and images © Matthew Venables 2010. All Rights Reserved.
Wednesday, February 24: 2010.
The Dead Hospital | Detail #1 : The Pigeon
Its just been a week of the the go fasters eh? Amongst the shite heap of my half moved houses and growing mass of most enjoyable commitments found a coupla hours to tour
The Dead Hospital with mate n collegue Mr Christopher "Bollywood Beggles" Beghin. Equipment lashed on backs, cameras to hand, lightweight gas masks in place across snout n cakeholes, our sharpened eyes rove doublequick across the fast deserted hospice.
Wandering...most the time halfway to lost, we're amongst the hastily abandoned detritus of medical land, say ten, fifteen years on, the natural and wanton human destruction heightened by the pooled leaks of the last weeks floods, a place of total indiscrimination. Discarded clothes, bottles, photo albums, administrative papers and records with or without clips atop chairs, filing cabinets and the full gamut of beige to grey office goods just occupying space across four or five different levels of yet another wing in the numerous buildings with fits n rigs and the scientific machinery of twenty years before... where to look? down corridor after corridor, one room along or atop and after another, this places' a supernatural horror film about set to happen.
In one room carpeted by smashed one man troughs n once white cisterns, all paint tears from the walls. In a long hallway sits a lone chair swathed in a mouldering sheet. A large chamber has an orbed silver scanner of some description mounted to a prehensile arm swinging from the ceiling. Two chairs sit at conference underneath amidst the crap on the concrete floor. On a top level with the sun streaming through I slip and just catch balance on a floor caked in now remoistened pigeon slop. Suddenly in their domain they're taking shocked flight all around, thumping, scrabbling into the remaining windows.
After a couple of hours the air seems to thicken to the point a halfa coughing fit takes ahold and I splutter my round a corner and evacuate my stomachs' contents, enough for the day and anyway, this place`ll take us some weeks of exploration...After all my blather thought it a nice tease to show but a small detail, pace `the show' with a slow reveal, we're thinking already at some future point of a paired exposition.
That's it besides calling for an excellent week for each and every one of us. He he.