Laura Grace Ford

The Leeds mapped here is imbued with a sense of truancy and escape. Walking, as a fugitive act, is an engagement with spectrality, it conflates temporalities, makes quantum moves through the terrain.

The idea of the return or haunting is central to this work, and the plasticity of fiction, its capacity to be continually re-made, is a useful metaphor for the city. I draw on my own biography, the psychic sediments of Yorkshire where memory is experienced as tremors in the landscape. The writing issolvent, dissolving temporal distances and boundaries

The work is as an affective portrait of Leeds in 2019. I drift through Trinity and Victoria Gate to map the emotional contours of a city at a particular moment. The medieval boundaries  are traced by delineating the edges of the retail zone. These are sites where repressed and partially erased voices become audible, the soft points and thresholds, the interstitial zones - Merrion Centre, Kirkgate Market, Quarry Hill, York Road, Mabgate

The idea of mapping a city's psychic infrastructure goes beyond the observations of the individual and moves towards a collective mapping, a socio-geographic reading of the terrain. Fred Moten talks about hapitcality, the feelings you tune into through others. Cedric Robinson said that the dispossessed created solvent objects that could erode attempts to fix the city in a colonial bind.

We articulate these feelings  by following the lanes, tracks and burrows that branch away from the designated route, the scrawls in the margins undermining the official text. The work emerges from derelict warehouses of Leylands, the imprint of Quarry Hill flats, the brick fields and fire clay of Burmantofts. These are the sites of becoming, generators of larval subjectivity, places neoliberalism can't assimilate.

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