The Join is a place in transition, an indeterminate zone around housing developments under construction, spaces in managed decline or simply wasted. The Join is the name I have given to the general condition of all the cities I visit. I could think of it as a Zeitgeist but this is too rigid an idea and I want to keep in mind the transitory, tentative and literally speculative condition of The Join. It is a place where dreams of dwelling are visualised on advertising hoardings situated at the heart of degraded contemporary urban environments. These places are like this because the state has turned its back on the basic functions of cleansing and maintenance, investing instead in the brokering of deals, handing over of assets and preparation of land for profit, in which this absence of care, this atmosphere of ruination plays a vital part.
I think of The Join as a place of conflict – a suture rather than a seam – where environmental degradation, traffic pollution, the forever-flotsam of abandoned domestic waste and so on, confront hasty digital visions of contemporary lifestyles. These are unimaginative lifestyles mostly in the rental sector, whose marketing routinely flouts trades descriptions legislation. Cramped rooms with basic comforts are designated luxury and banal urban futures – gym membership, teleworking, drinks with friends, maybe small dog ownership- somehow become entangled with the idea of Utopia.
The violence of this clashing of past and present; temporary and perennial; degraded soil and photographic illusion in The Join paradoxically alerts us, or should do, to something smoother. This is a seductive orchestration of spatial imaginaries, a manipulation of atmospheric conditions, all moving towards a common goal: profit. The accumulation of profit is a direct consequence of the difference between levels of present degradation and the seductive power of the sites future image. The ravages of time, lack of investment, maintenance and care are well known, if not always deliberately harnessed, mechanisms for increasing profit from suitably located urban sites.
Texts & images by Ava Perrot
The Join 