THE CROSSING

A Psychogeography devised by Nicolas Salazar Sutil and Tom Tlalim


This activity involved creating a subjective map and performing a walk in and around Roehampton University. The walk was inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem The Wreck of the Deutschland, which was written in honour of five Franciscan nuns who died in a shipwreck whilst crossing the English Channel, in an attempt to flee religious persecution in Germany, in 1875.
 
Participants walked from the Gerard Manley Hopkins plaque located at the entrance of Whitelands College, all the way up to Froebel College, via the Alton Estate. With up to 13,000 residents, Alton Estate is one of the largest Council Estates in the UK. It is considered a landmark of modernist architecture and urban planning in London.
 
This piece was conceived as a string of messages found on the walls and bins of the Alton Estate, where graffiti and wall climbing is strictly banned. The walk connects the various words scribbled on the walls to form a poem that can be walked-- from the starting point at the Manley Hopkins memorial to the memorial death site of a local mother who was run over by a lorry whilst crossing Danebury Avenue in 2013.
 
 A series of concrete poetic statements were added by the participants of the walk, each layer focusing on a different sensation felt by the participant whilst performing the walk.

The poem below was walked and devised by Tom Tlalim, Nicolas Salazar Sutil, Sara Houston, Sarah Whatley, JJ Deveraux, Christian Cherene, Jonathan Skinner, Michaelina Jakala and Sandra Noeth