As the pandemic lockdown progresses, I am noticing how popular squares, parks and people’s local neighborhoods are losing their geographic and social importance. Urban life and urban space are increasingly coming to a halt. What’s more, urban space attains a new, negative connotation as a forbidden, lifeless setting. In the process, sites are becoming abandoned, including secluded parking garages, parks on the edges of town and empty park benches. These also happen to be the kind of ‘non-spaces’ that skateboarders have always appropriated for their practice, thereby adding layers of identity, relation, and history. With my project, I want to bring skateboarders into the newly abandoned cities
But also in a distanced fashion, as a digital image, just as removed and absent as the rest of urban life. In the dark of night, I am using a video beamer to project cropped photos of skateboarders in oversized proportions onto abandoned spaces – such as buildings and walls – thereby providing photographic proof of the newly defined (non) use and perception of urban spaces. My photographic work, which otherwise feeds off the close proximity of skateboard athletes, now attains a distance to its subjects. Social distancing leads to ‘freezing’ the otherwise dynamic skateboard movements in space. Thereby, the installations capture the current lack of motion, in the nighttime, of spaces, people, and settings. And for a brief moment, they inject a sense of life and motion into the new stillness.
