Rights of Way

Four Films of Solace,
The Dazzle Club, 2020

Looped video

Together, we walk to pay attention to new questions of publicness and being seen.

As our feet cross public space, our image is scrapped, leaked, harvested. The data landing in global databases, a ‘ping’ flagging our identity, caught in the gaze of unknown apparatus, potentially in the hands of unregulated companies.

During the pandemic The Dazzle Club has returned to places of our previous Dazzle Walks through public archives - webcams, google maps, video conference technology, found footage - bringing our bodies back to personally significant public spaces. Within the confines of our own homes, we looked out to the now empty places we had walked in 2019, exploring them remotely via digital memory.

The global pandemic has transformed the way we encounter the city, as public spaces echo with fear of the stranger’s body. Previously politicised fears about individual safety concerning gang violence and petty theft are overlaid with fear of bodily fluids and viral droplets.

Four short films highlight this interrelation of the body and this city as surveillance journals of women walking in London. We transform distance and depth into a pure surface, whilst rejecting the possibility of displacement with an insistence that the city only exists as a place of bodies. We embrace new familiarity to our public spaces whilst simultaneously feeling solace in old belongings.

We revisit places that highlight the transformation of London’s public spaces from common ground to POP* – Westfield Shopping Centre, Canary Wharf, Granary Square, Spitalfields – where developers have devised surveillance, checkpoints and by-laws on their own terms, creating an inaccessible veil to who is seen and who can enter. Shopping, banking and luxury leisure are what matters in their real time. These hyper-branded places are meticulously polished and regulated, subverting the feeling of being seen to seeing everything you don’t want to see.

We seek, and attempt to make, an archive that remembers something else, that accommodates another, more magical, and embodied, sense of belonging.



Shoreditch Fields, Evie Price, 2020

Arbitrary Punishment (are you filming?), Georgina Rowlands, 2020

Three Point Detection, Emily Roderick, 2020

Uninflected Continuity (after Rainer), Anna Hart, 2020

*Privately Owned Public Space