Wrecked on the Intertidal Zone

Abstract

“Wrecked on the Intertidal Zone” is an online gallery of fifteen short films that document an investigative arts project into the environmental destruction of the Thames Estuary. The gallery shows some of the different activities of the arts project and explores the thinking behind it, such as digging a twelve ton forty foot cockle fishing boat out of the mud and turning it into an anti-monument, foraging for food, catching brown shrimp, exploring Canvey Island and the Hadleigh Ray, writing an Epitaph of the Common Mud, running citizen science workshops, interviewing local author and historian Rachel Lichtenstein, as well as project collaborators YOHA and the Critical Art Ensemble. In terms of research, the project explores how to best document a multi-layered investigative arts project, using Klynt software to build a non-linear narrative around all of the project’s different activities. The process of production has also opened up innovative approaches, such as exploring how to use GoPro cameras as technical objects in a post-human environment, and producing video content with multiple partners, including Goldsmiths, Arts Catalyst, and students from the Royal College of Art and Queen Mary’s College, and particularly also with former UWE Filmmaking students, Jim Smith and Zander Mavor.