As London looks forward to 2012′s Olympics, the self-styled ‘greatest show on Earth’, Iain Sinclair projects his vision of the post-games future by visiting the ruins of previous grand projects. His new book, Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project, starts out from the East London Olympic site and takes in Athens and the abandoned architectural monuments of the millennium to report back on the trouble to come. Iain Sinclair discusses the book with fellow travellers at this launch event.
Part of the London Literature Festival
Iain sent this update which I didn’t read until it was too late (sorry Iain!):
“I wanted to add a footnote to information about the event at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank, on Wednesday. It won’t be a conversation about ‘Ghost Milk’, or a polite literary interrogation. We’ll be attempting an opened-out version of the book, in several registers and several voices.
The evening will include: Emily Richardson’s film elegy to the huts of the Manor Garden Allotments. And a new film-assembly made from my original 8mm footage of Chobham Farm, Stratford, in the 1970s (and other memory fragments from that era), along with extracts from ‘The Cardinal and the Corpse’ (my first collaboration with Chris Petit), and new footage shot by Petit on a bicycle tour (de force) of the blue fence. All of this finessed by editor Emma Matthews.
Gareth Evans will chair the event, initiating conversations on themes related to the philosophy of the grand project. Chris Petit will present an account of his notion of the age of post-cinema and decommissioning. And an introduction to his response: The Museum of Loneliness. And I will collaborate with Bill Parry-Davies (on saxophone) in a jazz-text account of Olympic Park contamination. Bill will reveal information from research files and reports on toxic soil.”