M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

London Fieldworks
Stalin Animal Show Home, Super Kingdom, 2008 � London Fieldworks
King’s Wood takes its name from the Jutish kings who
occupied Kent c400-c600 following the retreat of the
Roman occupation army. After having been summoned
as mercenaries to suppress the Pictish tribes by the
Romano-British they subjugated the native Britons and
established the Kingdom of Kent. According to traditional
history, this created the opening wedge for Anglo, Saxon
and Jute migration into Britain. This period of time
roughly coincides with late antiquity c300-c600, a
periodization used by historians to describe the
transitional centuries from Classical Antiquity to the
Middle Ages, in both mainland Europe and the
Mediterranean world. A range of more dramatic names
are given to the period in popular works: the Dark Ages,
the Brythonic Age, the Age of Tyrants or the Age of
Arthur, where antagonistic, powerful kingdoms absorbed
weaker sub-kingdoms and neighbours.
In the winter of 2007, as a way of imaginatively
charging the forest space, our first act as commissioned
artists was to bring a number of non-native animal
species into the wood and photograph them. Namely, a
boa constrictor and a poison dart frog from tropical
Central and South America; an Australian white’s tree
frog and an American ‘new world’ turkey vulture. The
exotic fauna appeared strangely at home in the damp,
dark English wood. Seemingly relaxed, perched in a
beech tree, the vulture evoked the belligerent spirit
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of the fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. A chilling
reminder of the countless number of people
‘disappeared’ in forest environments by despots around
the world.
Drawing on our previous experiences of the
edge cities within Bangalore and São Paulo and the
collision of habitats and inequality that exist around them
we initiated a collaboration with London based Consarc
architects to design 3 distinct animal habitats. In “Planet
of Slums”, Mike Davis references Brazil’s most famous
walled edge city: “Named perversely after the dark new
world in Godard’s dystopian 1965 film, Alphaville is a
complete private city with a large office complex, an
upscale mall, and walled residential areas – all defended
by more than 800 private guards.” Edge cities have been
described as self sufficient “off worlds” because they
incorporate large employment bases as well as most of
the retail and cultural apparatus of traditional urban
cores. (Davis, 2006)
The Prestige Group, one of South India's most
successful developers of real estate, which “for over 4
decades now, has changed the very skyline of Bangalore,
Chennai, Kochi, Hyderabad, Mangalore, Goa” has built
over 70 ‘residential enclaves’ with names such as Palm
Springs, Long Beach, Serenity, Ozone, Utopia, Dreamland
and Sunnyvale. These “off-worlds” are designed to
distance their inhabitants from the sight of abject poverty