in collaboration with

Yorgos Loizos

UCLU Young Writers Society

S P A C ESSE

10 SECONDS AROUND A MANNEQUIN

Harry Burkeuntitled18

this poem has to be about televisionroy liechtenstein told me that beforei’d even defined my ‘high school days’with the arthritis we call 1950s americaif you were to ask me about the subjecttoday though i’d quote shows such astwin peaks dexter and black books andperhaps imagine watching them with agirlfriend and bottle of red wine letme take you upstairs and show you something you’ll never have seen before(basic information: gender = male)i’ll tell you what i’ve always been muchmore into films though more specificallyamerican films that feed off of frenchnew waves films that feed off of americanfilms with a little bit of the abjectthough just to show you i sympathise letme take you upstairs and show you something you’ll never have seen before(add as friend? lives in london, uk)it’s hard to say what kind of girls ilike but i guarantee that they’ll liketo snuggle up after and read all thebooks that pete doherty likes and if thispoem seems to be regressing into some 90sbrit pop hit i can assure you it’s not itwas always going to be some sort of sonicyouth drawl couldn’t you tell from thefirst line imagine listening to pearljam during oh i oh i’m still alive letme take you upstairs and show you something you’ll never have seen before(add as friend? from seattle, washington)thinking about it some more i’ve realised

this poem is actually all about materialitythat explains all the desperate marryingof fin-de-siecle and the red scare who’dhave thought i’d be sitting here in 2011talking about the listlessness of modernism like the way gingerbread is just fantasticbut goes a bit soggy and rotten when oldlike that stuff you always see sellotapedup in supermarkets anyway girl let me justtake you upstairs and show you somethingyou’ll never have seen before i’ve almosttold you everything about myself and whatare your views on the legacy of henry ford(information withheld)

DOMESTIC AUTOMATA 1

Ned Carter Miles

When, in our Brutalest moments,We built these towersIn the wake, and polyglotDispatch of empire

So proud

We never once thoughtThat in their sepulchral bodies,Alive by dint of in-livers,We’d trade life for shiny, votive offeringsFlooding the market of the beyond

And remain.

Us and our appliances,These lonely, bird-like machines,Carved and not built,That left no sign or cicatrix,No sigh nor parting kissOn the mother ore that bore them.

We and They are a euphonyIn the vacuum of escaping days.

DOMESTIC AUTOMATA 3

Freya Field-Donovan

Surface is too easily accepted as the limit –as the whole.A finished product, habitually projected onto the moving substance of the past, the present, the future. The ruptured surface, the impossible space,are shoots in the forest of signs.

Human/Automata/Memory/Photograph

An unidentifiable blemish in the shifting network of signs.

DOMESTIC AUTOMATA 4

Kirsty Irving

The skull is back, meshed inside your seven skirts,reminding you that a hundred skirtswill not swaddle you from death. Not even you,King Annelise, first breasted king, who fidgets at the muslin, at this, your own coronation,stands during sitting time, roars like an apeas the skull, its sockets gauzed, knocksagainst your knee, looks emptily up,up, up to the flag being winchedon a dumbwaiter of admiration,the fluted A and R hugging across an appleor a pregnant belly; what could be a shadowcould easily be a bulbous navel. King Annelise,my liege, run for the woods in hessian,itching as your castle turns tramp to the ragof state tonguing from the turrets.Oh Lise Rex, your doom outdoes you.The walls mutate into branches,the cobbles to dung and creepersand your own hands to claws,your damned skirts to patchy fur,your spine lurching like a clock handfrom midnight to quarter past nine.Somewhere the trumpets are calling dinnerso you dip what is left of your head, and, wetly,between your teeth, you end your first life.

DOMESTIC AUTOMATA 5

Harry Stopes

This street is rainFull recycling boxes5 doorbells on each houseWhere paving stones don’t sitThey floatOn mud that squelches upEach time a stone see sawsTo soak another shoe.Over the city the rainUnder the pavement the mud.Oh I’ve lost my halo I haveI have lost it indeed.I clasp my leg under meAnd watch the sky.My heart ticks.

EARLY STUDIES OF LIGHT SHADOW OBJECT 1

Kate RossFear of Light

The syndrome had spread like wildfire. Its effects were much the same, and soon enough, all sunlight had fallen victim to the infection. Scientists speaking about the condition on the radio had called it a ‘malignant deformation of light particles’ where the structure of light and its quantative measurement in units of illuminance, or lux, had been corrupted and made highly volatile. Sunlight had, in essence, become a form of channelled fire capable of tearing holes in absolutely everything with which it made contact. It could burn a man’s flesh from his bones and then make short work of the latter too. Light could turn matter into ash as easily as a campfire could quickly devour a stack of kindling. People said it was like napalm, only sent from an angry and vengeful nature rather than being a product man-made for the purposes of warfare.

Subsequently, man has learnt to live in isolation from others, alone in self-contained bedsits wherein window-less walls are strengthened with specially-manufactured, reinforced concrete. He exists trapped behind steel-plated doors secured and bolted by twelve different locks and held in place by cumbersome and heavy sliding bars. Such is the necessity for these precautions that it is now the locksmiths of the world that are amongst the most powerful citizens. They guard their trade scrupulously and live secretive lives, appearing only when called upon and when the promised price is to their liking. You can always tell a locksmith’s house from the outside since every wall had been plated in custom-built metallic sheets designed to reflect harmful rays of light. These impenetrable, glittering asphalt fortresses are the safest possible domicile one could ever aspire to inhabit, but normal people must content themselves with something comparatively more humble.

Inside the average bedsit, the atmosphere is one of perpetual twilight. Rooms are artificially lit by bulbs omitting only a dull, throbbing glow, the cost of which is phenomenal, the number of which are gradually running out. Impossible to reproduce, these bulbs are relics of a bygone era. Scientists speaking about the light bulbs on the radio have said recently that experiments being carried out in order to find a means of making more are producing encouraging results. They say that it is only a matter of time before the compatible materials can be sourced and then brought together in order to correctly assemble the bulbs. Such statements however, have been made for a number of years now only people fail to realise this, since all sense of time has been lost with the abdication of the daytime for the withdrawal into shadow and darkness that everyone

Scientists speaking on the radio have speculated that this may be due to an innate characteristic of the camera and its ability to capture and harness areas of negative and positive space in the form of shadow and light. They have posited the notion that this may render the camera a viable tool in the analysis of the burning light syndrome, so that it might be better understood and, eventually, combated. In sacrificing her life in order to capture her own immanent demise, the girl may have provided the means to save the human race. The fear of light of which no one has been spared may soon be a thing of the past.

has had to undertake. Man is naturally incapable of going outside in the daytime hours, and has thus been forced to lead a nocturnal existence, rising with the sunset and arriving back home before its re-emergence. The nature of occupations too has had to adapt to the conditions imposed by the malignant light deformity. Written material, and its production with it, has become largely obsolete. Artists and anyone engaged with visual media have been forced to pursue alternative career-paths and with the redundancy of the television, the radio has witnessed an astonishing comeback.

Through fear of light, man seeks solace in sound. Music is cheaply available and extremely popular with those who live alone, which is the majority of the human population. It fills the empty chasm incurred by the prevailing darkness and occupies space as though another friendly voice in the room. People are greedy for sound, in love with an abstract voice, so much so that scientists speaking about the nature of sound on the radio state that it is arguably more addictive than nicotine. What previous generations have referred to as ‘cabin fever’ is rife, and it is not unusual for people to form strange attachments to sonic frequencies, cooped up in their bedsits for days at a time with only a distantly detached voice for company.

The world is thus one of uninterrupted sounds, of industrial, mechanical machinery, of disco beats and electronic rhythms, of spoken word and classical concerto. Noise is everywhere and silence is inconceivable. The shadow man lives in has made it blind and the noise used to fill the void will soon render him deaf. The senses will slowly decay, and in the midst of the worldly shadows in which he lives, man cannot even watch it happening.

The image that accompanies this report is an extremely rare photograph taken at the moment when unimaginable human carelessness left a front door ajar and the deadly light into the interior of a room. It is miraculous that such an image should survive this occurrence, and even more unlikely that a camera should be capable of recording it without breaking. Observe how the blistering solar veins splinter the shag-pile and shred the curtains, ripping holes in the Acanthus-leaf patterned walls and tearing briskly through wooden furniture as though it were tissue paper. The girl who took the photo was soon trapped in the corner of her room, unable to escape as the diseased light trickled ever closer, burning her possessions and cracking the urn of her mother’s ashes that sat next to a gilded lamp on the coffee table, scattering them into the room to mingle with the ash produced by the napalm-light. The girl did not survive this catastrophe. Her photograph however, did.

EARLY STUDIES LIGHT SHADOW OBJECT 2

Aga Reza Ali KhanChosen Embers

The scene is old,Flame and timber dancing for our comfort,The aesthetic innate and immutable,Light and shade and grey,The scene around is perfect dark,The flaming logs,A sentient glow among the fauna of ubiquity,Shifting and contorting,Re-teaching us our heathen pre-knowledge.

The light, intense at source,Erupts into the void,Knowing the futility of resistance,The void edges closer to the logs’ camp,The incendiary begins to wither,The dimming seems to last beyond the infinity,And the dark weeps for its lost totality.

LIGHT PROJECTIONS 2

Tobias Chapple

At this time of day, I consider smoking.

When bright turns soft, and déjà-vu could etch An image of the evening on the tiles, A calm takes over the inner lights.Nostalgia drips down, moulds to wet cement, And I consider adding my own swirls.

I draw a bath and ignore the rain. I paint ink, quiet rows, curved steel And half a pause by the ronde, With water that fills acrylic pores.

I will trouble the surface of Speckled moments turned crumpled monotone, Of the blocked out capitals of a name - Ajay, aJay, AJ - And of skin, a whisper, Commonly misheard;

I disturb this thought. Startle the water that dreams of waves, These rounded frontiers of the day; The voice in my head saying that it doesn’t believe in twisting‘All indifference is a different rage’

The hand plunges in. “I refuse to feel your lips in its granulated curves I have no sense of your shape in its words”

Your letter turns Leaf Dissolves peacefully I put my hand out for the bloom.

It sucked on my thumb towards the end.

LIGHT PROJECTIONS 4

Bazil Azmil

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MANNEQUIN BODY 1

Stef Newton

Starts are dictated by endings. When it’s expected of us to only stare absent-mindedly, I looked at you and saw. And that changed everything.

She pulls at her hair when she’s anxious. She likes highlighters. She drinks too much coffee.

I think of the times our paths almost crossed, all the hellos we’ve missed. Years, separated by minutes. A stranger I never looked in the eye, did you watch me go by?

She only eats the yellow M&Ms. She doesn’t believe in love. She listens to 70s music.

‘Is she?’ The one and only. The magician. ‘Yes’, they told me, sounding unimpressed. As you pull yet another rabbit out of your hat, I wonder whether it’s tiresome to always please, and whether you think you’ve paid too high a price for the attention. The white monster struggles, its red eyes gleaming. Applause, the tragedy of your trick lost to the hunger for entertainment.

She loves seals. She’s afraid of escalators. She wants to change the world.

You smile at me, a true artist. I feel lifted in the air, and I hear their laughter. What I am to you has no name, as things devoid of meaning often don’t. I am oblivion. I am freedom. I am escape. I am red-eyed proof that everything comes at a price.

She only lets the phone ring twice. She knows all the lyrics to ‘Hey Jude’. She doesn’t like rain.

You are powerful in that moment of stunned silence. In the standing ovation. But when the lights go out, the reality of what you have done is overwhelming. You have conjured something into this world that can only survive caged, stripped of magic.

She doesn’t eat breakfast. She’s lost fifteen Oyster cards. She forgets to water the plants.

I feel your pulse getting weaker. You look surprised. The creator never thinks about the object. You assumed I would spend my days in the front row, cheering for your pretense.

She told me I was the one. She wanted to quit smoking. We fell asleep holding hands.

You close your eyes. The curtain opens and I walk into the light. Applause, because the name and the face don’t matter. Starts are dictated by endings.

MANNEQUIN BODY 4

Harry Burkeuntitled14

looking up saints who share your nameonly to find bernini has already given themso much horror and so much ecstasyreally emphasises the stone in which i set youlast thursday night the faint stickiness of thepear cider on your venetian blinds andthe gothic resolution of your face.

no wonder we british never excelled at sculptureuntil henry moore came along yeteven after seeing his tate retrospectivelast summer all i wanted to do wasgo get a sandwich.

MANNEQUIN SMEARED

Elizabeth Kaplunov

I twisted your head. Northbound.You smiled a torn grimace, turned roundI pushed your hands backwards, turned over your worldYou lost balance, fell, choked back swearwordsI clicked, fingers near the lighter’s flame.You fought back but fell down all the same.

OLYMPIA DOLL 1

Aga Reza Ali KhanPatience

My face is adorned with the weather of age,My body seems broken,And my thoughts rarely align,Confused,Memory fades and bleaches, their records slowly erasedBut my heart,My still beating heart,It still feels the thrill of the new,The child,The wonder,It never leaves,The hurt and love for my mother,My father,I miss their embrace,A world of people,Of obfuscated importance,Just me,Watching a cloud,Still smiling, waiting for my mother’s voice to call me home again.

OLYMPIA DOLL 4

Anna Kirk

As a child she slept in shampoo damp French plaits. Come morning when she let out waves her father said she looked Pre-Raphaelite. Her mother drowned, a ghost blue mermaid in her head. She drew sunsets with her dead mother’s lipsticks. Ends of day in Bella Donna Mauve.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S GAZE - CASTIGLIONE LEGS

Eley Williams

The bottom line is, it’s not your fault: no-one expects a Gorgon to wear an off-the-shoulder gown.

On the leaflet her footnotes seemed innocuous enough (although the details were phrased in a tone of gentle titillation that you really ought to know better than to trust on first glance). She was, you read, born into a ticker-tape parade of diacritic marks:

Virginie Élisabeth

Louise Charlotte Antoinette Thérèse

Marie Oldoïn.

- a mouthful before she became an eyeful. Elsewhere it mentions that she was renowned for her risqué poses, often with the head cropped out. She enjoyed the eccentricity of sitting still.

Before you stand fully before the picture, a fable that might have been helpful in explaining your upcoming relationship with her:

‘There is a surprising suppleness to light,’ remarked the ant, full of awe, to the lowered magnifying glass on that sunny afternoon.

It’s difficult to spell daguerreotype without it’s sharper, shorter cousin word. You see? The threat was there all along but, blithely, you insisted on looking closer. And so she loomed into sight, sitting patiently and waiting for your two types of grazing. 1) grazing: the nibbling attention of onlookers, browsing like cud-hungry cows. 2) grazing: something bloody and rubbed too raw -a pity to ruin such pretty knees.

You stepped closer because there was a pleasing theatricality to the picture’s set-up that let you overlook the potential indelicacy of naked ankles and the gummy pressure of paint upon nails. And what happened next is a bit like love in that one look was all it took to be trapped in something spangled, churning, weir-like. For her part, she was well aware that she could floor you if she used both eyes so it was just the one this time; still, at this distance a single wink would prove a swift left-hook to your solar plexus, that fleshy flash-bulb beneath your ribs. A ‘go-thither’ stare, a punch through any attempts at grey smirching and cloudiness. Available, unveilable,

you looked directly

at her &

[A gong hit][a bomb banged][a world born]

sfumato vs. bravadothis prettiest Cyclops pitted her eyeline against yours.

As sad and bold as a moth finally in flames,In the time it took for you to work out whether she was wearing a ring on her wedding finger You caught her eye and found that it spat hot stars.

OLYMPIA DOLL 5

Chris Couch

I looked to my mirror as an impartial friend who was not afraid of a withering or a put-down to my pout. In need of a name, I searched up ‘beauty in Greek’ and so it was; my mirror Kalos (a she) and I, styled ‘Alexinous’, having endless dialogues in my bedroom. Eventually they became none too pleasant.

‘O! Take me back to those days gone yonder when I believed that tarnish to be merely a crack in you!’. ‘O dear Alexinous!’ she would reply, ‘Now you know that it spreads across us both like a spider’s web’

I once cleaned her with Windolene and left a smear, it lasted for days. The stuff ’s gone to shit from the advertised ideal I thought, when a broad feller muscled purely by rustic means would take a cloth to a barn door and hew it clear glass. I soon realised that the entire relationship was a failure, as I was no Alexinous and she... well she was still Kallos, but we were very different. She of course gets a set of new faces with the tenancies, lest I smash her to bits (but no, the damage deposit), whereas all I can do, which is all I could ever do, is spectate myself going off. That came to me as I sat sipping skinny latte across from the back-end of a Tesco where they were turfing out unsold vegetables. I thought ‘those peppers look great to me’. Red and juicy but with a few dimples of mush (I’d call it charm or character) yet they were on their way due to decay. So I think here’s my cells, no chloroplasts, here’s the ribosome turning me outwards to leering eyes then inwards, onwards, to the grave, and oh wouldn’t it be better if I had the chloroplast so that I might be going outwards then inwards then outwards again, my appendages curling up crispy like bacon and dropping to the earth, feeding the soil, only to come back in the spring? But seeing yourself becoming dented and soft... there’d be no pleasure in that, no joy in the fall from grace, only the prospect of return to former glories back on the shelf; what a living!

Hardly in a position to judge though, I thought, life spent talking to a pretentious mirror.

OLYMPIA DOLL 3

Ed Sibley

I intend for this document to represent a complete summary of the events ofMarch 3rd 2009. It will proceed in two parts. In the first I will provide abrief summary of the various odds and ends of information available relatingto the disappearance of Yorgos Loizos. In the second, I will offer my ownpersonal account of the event, and then to conclude I will offer somethoughts and views that I have developed in the time that has elapsed sincethen. Slightly over two years have passed. I had at one time intended tocomplete this account to mark the second anniversary of the date, butordinary human events interceded and so I was sadly unable. I’m not undulyupset by this. I normally place little stock by anniversaries.

I will start by making a point about my use of the word ‘disappearance’.This was not the word generally used by the press at the time. Mostpublications used the word ‘explosion’, presumably for its dramatic impact.Others opted for ‘evaporation’. As an eyewitness, I believe neither isreally accurate. ‘Explosion’ is wholly misleading in its suggestion ofviolence and disorder. However, ‘evaporation’ is scarcely better, as itimplies a sort of prolongedness or process to the event. When one picturesevaporation one imagines a process of melting into the air. Both words implya vivid picture, one way or another, and in both cases the image is not trueeither to the event as I experienced it, or to the one photographic imagethat exists of the pivotal moment.

I will offer my eyewitness account later on in this document, and I hopethat when I do the reader will understand why I have been cautious in mychoice of language. I have used the word ‘disappearance’ throughout myaccount, and I have not done this without careful deliberation.

Little is know of Yorgos Loizos other than the unique circumstances of herdisappearance. What little biographical information is available to thepublic only serves to suggest an additional mystery to that which alreadysurrounds her. This mystery is that what we know about Loizos is nothing outof the ordinary. In the few accounts we have of her character and behaviour,there is nothing to suggest that she was in any way unusual.

political dissidence. Quite why God had chosen dissidence as the sin to warnagainst, or why a disappearing girl was the medium for this warning, was amystery that Smith did not elaborate upon. As is the story wasn’t fancifulenough, she later reported (to considerably less media attention) that shehad found a reproduction of the now-famous disappearance image on a slice oftoast, and was the subject of several caricatures. Adams’s secondarytestimony is more succinct - she merely asserts that other guests reportedhearing her ‘laughing loudly’ at different hours of the night from insideher room. However, it should be remembered that the setting was a youthhostel. Drunkenness and late-night shenanigans are commonplace, and thereseems no reason to believe that the other guests had any awareness ofLoizos, let alone would have known which room of the 200 in the hostel washers.

As I say, I choose to discount these stories, for two reasons. Firstly, theydid not emerge until some weeks after the event had all but passed out ofthe public consciousness. At the time of the event, they had no suchfar-fetched stories, only nonplussed accounts of Loizos’ unremarkable habitsand unremarkable demeanour. Secondly, the two stories offer entirelyseparate and non-overlapping portraits of the girl, suggesting that theywere fabricated independently of one another and share no common germ oftruth.

These stories appeared in the press in the months following the event. I wasat the time in a period of personal depression, partly due to the death of aclose friend and partly due to the stress of the disappearance andsubsequent invasion of my personal life by inquisitive folk. The appearanceof these accounts in the papers did nothing to ease my melancholia. Theyinflamed my sense of cynicism and I publicly accused both persons of beingliars. Predictably, my arguments gained only a little attention, and whatlittle attention they received was more because I was an eyewitness of theevent, and less because I had made cogent arguments. I was quoted as afigure of novelty rather than as a voice of reason.

It is worth pointing out that the entire maid-and-receptionist debacle wasconducted on the pages of the tabloid press. ‘Supernatural’ events are morecommonly the province of those sorts papers, I suppose. It is only becausethe event happened in such a public space, and there were so many eyewitnessaccounts (as well as the image itself) that it garnered its initial tractionin the broadsheet newspapers. In December it appeared in several end-of-yearnews rundowns but other than this it passed out of public discussion more

The only curious thing about this information is how little there is of it.However, whether this lack of information is specifically related to herdisappearance or not is debatable. The information we have available ismostly anecdotal. It is possible, or indeed probable, that the powers thatbe have uncovered more about her than has been released into the publicsphere. However, I would wager that anything they have unearthed is probablyas unremarkable as the information that already exists.

At the time of the disappearance, Loizos was staying in a youth hostel inSouth Kensington. These were the facts, as they emerged: She had been inresidence for around a fortnight, and the staff at the Hostel rememberlittle of her from around this time, save that she rose early and leftearly, and would return in the early evening and confine herself to herroom. She didn’t disclose to the hostel staff where it was she had comefrom. When her room was searched by the London Metropolitan Police Forcefollowing the event, they reported that her luggage consisted of a smallcanvas bag containing nothing but several changes of unremarkable clothes,around £30 in notes and coins, and a selection of toiletries which werefound on the shelf above the sink. There was one book, which was anEnglish-language translation of a collection of Borges stories. There was nowallet, purse, or means of identification. Presumably these were on herperson when she disappeared, if she had any at all. The staff remarked tothe press that she was polite. They said little else, at the time. None ofthe other guests at the hostel had anything to add to these accounts. Loizoshad kept to herself.

Of course, as you will know, since then, two of the hostel staff have comeforward and given strange and outlandish stories about her character to thepress. One was a maid responsible for cleaning rooms, and the other was thewoman who worked on the reception in the evening. The maid’s name is YvonneSmith and the receptionist is Juliet Adams. I give these stories no creditat all. I believe them to be fabrications, for reasons that I will detailshortly.

Smith’s story claims that Loizos had spoken to her in secret, one morning inthe hostel (this seems to conflict with the earlier testimony that Loizosleft early each morning). Smith asserts that Loizos had prophesied herimminent disappearance, with, predictably, a clause swearing the maid tosecrecy for a period of time. Smith claimed that Loizos had been sent byGod, and her ‘explosion’ (Smith’s word as well as the media’s) was intendedas a warning to the people of the world against the sinful dangers of

disappearance image. I include a reproduction of it alongside this accountonly for the sake of easy reference. It was ubiquitously printed onnewspaper covers and inside pages over the days that followed, and iswell-known.

Now, I will give my account of what I saw that day. I was on the tour withLoizos. I had booked my place in the hope of seeing the famous giant squid,which the Museum keeps pickled in its entirety in a glass tank in thecollection. To this day I still haven’t seen it like I wanted to that day,because after the disappearance it was taken off to be restored and Iunderstand it has yet to go back on public display. We were at that part ofthe collection where the squid is displayed at the moment of thedisappearance. It is a shame that I was unable to get a really good look atit. The giant squid species remains a preoccupation of mine, and I woulddearly love to see this specemin one day.

We were a group of 17. It is again testament to the scrutiny that we wereall of us under for a while afterwards that I know exactly what this figurewas. In terms of personal invasion I came off more lightly than some of theothers, due to the fact that I was looking in the wrong direction when thedisappearance happened. I saw the flash, but when I looked around Yorgos wasgone.

Various possible explanations for were proffered at the time. Some claimedit was an instance of the phenomenon of spontaneous combustion. Some relatedthe event to higgs-boson research at CERN, and others, tastelessly enough,suggested that it was the emergence of some new form of individual-targetedterrorist attack. However, when the world braced itself for furtherdisappearances, none came. The event was an isolated one. Some blamedaliens. To be honest, I credit even that suggestion as much as I credit anyof the other ones, which is very little at all.

The exact moments surrounding the event itself are well documented but Iwill here add my own visual account of those moments to the record. We werein the room in the Darwin Centre of the museum where the giant squid is keptin its tank. I was looking at the squid, bending down to look at it throughthe glass. It is a bizarre sight. Its flesh is bleached white by theformaldehyde and it has giant eyes. At the moment of the flash it appearedto convulse in its tank. This I assume was the effect of the sudden flash of

quickly than I would have expected. However, perhaps my perspective is adistorted one. #NHMexplosion was a trending topic on Twitter for some weeksbut dropped off after a while and that was more or less the tail-end of thematter.

The disappearance took place in the Natural History Museum, which issituated not far from Loizos’ hostel. Some staff recall seeing her around inthe week leading up to the incident, but again, these accounts areunremarkable and sporadic. They may well be fanciful in origin, althoughthere seems less reason to suspect this. On the day of her disappearance,Loizos attended a pre-booked tour of the Museum’s collection of pickledbiological specimens. These tours, called Spirit Level tours, are availableto the public by appointment. The individual wishing to take the tour musteither telephone the Museum’s reception in the morning, or presentthemselves in person. Only a few places are available, and so the call orvisit must be made early to ensure a place. The tours are free of charge,and popular.

Loizos booked her tour that morning by presenting herself in person. Sheappeared at the desk at 10:34 in the morning, and met a reception-workernamed Jeremy. It was Jeremy’s first day at the desk. These details areclearly trivial, but I include them in order to give some illustration ofthe depth and detail of the investigation carried out by members of thepublic after the event. I should stress: To this day, the results of theofficial investigation have not been released, and nearly all of what is‘known’ about the disappearance has come to the light of the #NHMexplosioninvestigation. An incredibly quantity of facts like this were collected andcirculated at the time, both in the press and in social media.

What is most noteworthy about these investigations is that in spite of them,a consistent picture of Loizos herself, or of the events of the day, hasfailed to emerge. Nothing much of any depth was discovered about her orabout her background, save an address in a village in Hertfordshire. Noliving family members were discovered. Et cetera et cetera.

I have yet to mention the photographic image that remains the only imagethat exists of the moment of her disappearance. I say this - there is somedebate as to what the image really represents, and how it was made. A greatamount time and column-space has been given over to analysis of this

shock. No loud noise, even. No funeral. No hospital. Even in the event ofthe death of a stranger, there is a communality to those images that I thinkpermits a certain pathos. There was a strangeness and a uniqueness to thedisappearance of Yorgos Loizos that puts her final moments outside of thesphere of ordinary emotions. That is, assuming her disappearance was herdeath. I suppose it is entirely possible that she is still alive, perhapssomewhere else, although I don’t know why this would be the case any more orless than if she were dead.

However, my emotional alienation is complicated by the presence of thisimage. Looking at it today, I do not feel a distinct emotional reaction. Notgrief or fear, or even something more mundane. However, I do feel as thoughthere is something, like the proverbial gap where a tooth has been, a lackof a feeling where there ought to be one. What exactly this feeling ought tobe I do not know. I lack the emotional apparatus to process an event soalien.

My best guess about this sensation is that it is because something that waspersonal to me and the others there, that happened quietly, is being pulledinto the limelight. The incongruity of the privacy of the event and itspublic representation has fixed a sort of sanctity around the events, bynow. I suppose the past is always closed and unreachable but never does thisseem more the case than when one scene lasting no more than an instant hasplayed out over and over in your head and in reports every day for twoyears, and when this mystery is as unattainable to me, who was there at thetime, as it is to all the people reading their newspapers, I find I start towonder if I fact that I was there matters at all, and my attempts to findsome appropriate reaction to that day are perhaps invasive andinappropriate.

But this is besides the point. I think on the whole the most interestingthing about the disappearance and its subsequent digestion by the worldoutside is that it offers a rare study of the way the amorphous mass of thepublic digest an event that is inexplicable, unprecedented and alien. As wehave learnt, the way that the public digest an event of this sort is this:They fixate on it for a short while and then move on. I suppose this isbecause when no explanation or further detail emerges for public discussionto fixate on, the public discussion moves on to other topics. Perhaps theissue will be reignited when the conclusions of the official investigationare released. I will be interested to see what they conclude, although Idoubt very much it will be anything particularly substantial.

light changing the positions of the shadows on its surface. The flash itselfseemed like the sort that a camera makes. One of the girls cried out, and Iturned around to see what was going on. As I turned, a crack appeared in theglass of the squid tank, and a quantity of the preserving fluid began tospill out. Because I hadn’t been looking in the right direction at themoment that the disappearance occurred, I didn’t immediately realise thatanything had happened. What struck me first was that the now famous imagehad appeared on the glass wall of a display case. It took me a moment torealise that someone was missing from the group. It was 6 or 7 feet wide and4 or 5 high. The silhouette of the female figure was more-or-less lifesized. The glass seemed to have been singed as though by great heat,although I felt none myself.

In the papers, the image appears like a black and white photograph. Inreality, the image was somehow affected onto the glass wall. I can’t accountfor it. I saw it up close for a while but as I say that room is no longeropen to the public and the pane of glass itself has been removed, for testsI imagine. As it appeared to me, the areas that are black on the image wereblackened with a sort of soot, and on the area that is white the surface ofthe glass appeared to have melted. It was as though the silhouette on theleft of the image was caused because the area in Loizos’ shadow had beenprotected from the heat. I use the word ‘heat’; as I have already mentioned,at the time I felt none.

Various conjectures have been made about the photograph - that the whiteshape seems to look like a person hanging upside-down, or that if you lookat Loizos’ face, the way the white shape fits into it seems to revealanother face looking upwards. In these suggestions I again find zero value.The appearance of this white face looking upwards in the negative space ofthe picture is purely coincidence.

I still don’t know how to emotionally process the disappearance. Of course,I had no personal connection to Loizos, and in the half-hour that our livescrossed paths we never actively acknowledged one another. It is possiblethat perhaps I bumped into her, or perhaps I asked her ‘excuse me’ in orderto get a closer look at some pickled creature. I don’t know. I honestlydon’t know.

I don’t feel as if I was witness to a death, or the end of a person, becausenone of the ordinary correlatives of those things were present in thegallery. There was no body, no grieving family. No individuals or friends in

I think this illustrates something important about the way that popularattention relates to the importance of an event. Sometimes the volume of anissue in the public domain is in proportion to the ‘importance’ of an event,and at other times the ‘importance’ of an event is generated by its place inpublic discourse. Often, the two are the same thing. However, I believe thatthe disappearance of Yorgos Loizos is one of the most important things thathas happened, not only in recent history, but in the entire history of humanunderstanding. The disappearance is an event that cannot be correlated withanything else that has happened in the recorded history of the world. It isa thing that happened, over two years ago, in circumstances that cannot bereplicated. Although it is the stuff of tales of the supernatural, theevidence of its reality is unquestionable, and the implications of thisreality have been entirely absent from public discussion. This is a failureof our media.

Some comments on the image itself: Of course, the famous photograph that isin the papers is not the image itself. It is merely a representation ofvarious beams light playing off the real image, which was burned into theglass. Yorgos herself is to the left of the frame. The composition seemsdeliberate, but this can hardly be the case. The strange white polypousshapes to the right of the image recall, to my eye, the backs of thetentacles of the dead giant squid. It is unclear what caused them to appearin the photograph.

Really, all we can learn for sure from the image is a little about whatYorgos looked like. In the image we see clearly a little texture of herhair, and some outline of her face, her nose and lips.

.

SALT WATERS 4

Tom WoodruffIn The Ruins

Riddle with bullets and all cut to ribbonsLayed out in the corner, all sixes and sevensDown on my back from this sad-blood losingToo long living strange, too long sucking lemonsAnd though these frayed edges are bent out of shapeThe heart of the night isn’t too far from Heaven

Wrapped in the ruins, in feather boas and ginWe move West for that time zone we’re cravingTwo more silhouettes on the scent of frontiersYou said,“Look for the whites of my eyes when we’re leaving,When we bury this ship at the bottom of the ocean!”

Til then let’s drink so hard that we drown tooAnd when that time comes, it will come too soon.

SALT WATERS 5

Aga Reza Ali KhanWeep

Weep, That depth, May teach your incongruous,Fetid,Fettered,Self,Some humility,Let the water purge,Until all that’s left,Is teardrops,Ready to vaporize,Leaving beads of salt on the dry floor,Forever.

SHOP BACK DOOR

Ruth Mair

When business slows at the end of the day what are the mannequins supposed to do? It’s not like there’s a radio left on for them, or a T.V. We do that much for our pets, but the mannequins are left in silence without any movements to watch. Because they always watch. What else do they have to do? They are helpless. Some claim that they move when we’re not looking, but that’s an urban legend, something made up. Its only statues that do that. Mannequins are plastic; they have no souls and probably no feelings but there’s no way for us to know that for certain. It has been proved that animals have feelings (despite any philosophical debates about their having emotions) because they will actively avoid things that hurt them, but hasn’t it been suggested that boredom is a kind of torture too? So, at the shop back door at the end of the day, leaving the mannequins alone with no company, no entertainment, not even a buzzing light to attract moths, isn’t that a little heartless?

I’m sure they envy our movements, in and out like that. We take movement for granted so much I’m sure, and what they would give for arms to lift heavy boxes, legs to carry them, feet to ache.

SHOP WINDOW POLAROID TRANSFER 2

Ruth Mair

Green is the colour of the depths. Of weeds and mossy rocks and the bottom of lakes and rivers. The colour of drowning. As the air escapes slowly and the light of the sky moves further away, the colour that would be the last to be seen would be green. The indistinct shapes of a land that can never really be known, gradually blurring as the oxygen molecules abandon us.

Beyond green there’s really no more than darkness, no matter how hard you look. Anything else is only imagined, and in that oxygen starved moment its best not to look further at all. Who knows what you’ll see.

POLAROID SHOP WINDOW

Andrew CheahWe Would Like To Invite You For A Gathering

As you may well know, the family Muros has of recent times inherited a vast depository of Ancient Scrolls. The Scrolls written by The Late Great St Thrombone of Pisa, of his expeditions to the hitherto unknown lands of the Far East and the North Pole. bringing back with him many, many, toys, and several lifetimes worth of experiences, that, until now, have been unseen by all within the Family Muros.

We have as yet only opened one of the Sacred Scrolls, titled The Shoe. In the scroll, we have been educated on the art of the ritualistic carving of Panda organs, in the fashion of Italo-Oriental quality footwear, suitable for the long treks across the Gobi Desert in the search for skeletons. And are suitably excited for the unveiling of the remaining 799 Scrolls and its myriad of untold secrets.

For the opening of the remaining scrolls, we are hereby inviting yourself and your spouse, to join us as we embark on this momentous journey to the Land of Nod. The tents are now being erected, the ovens are pre-heating, the spears are being sharpened, and the forest is being cleared. The dawn of a new era awaits us on the grassy banks of the Loch, where there will be much food, laughter and merriment. Come, come, join us as the Loch, as we celebrate under the shadow of our forefathers.

SPINNING DOLL

Marta Owczarek

Wake up not knowing where the waves left you

As they bent crashing into the concrete shore,Did the current spill me out here, Or did my own loss of control?The solar-panelled landscape is still ringing, Flashback particles Not converging into a surface whole But bending even more.

You set sail on a straight track but never avoided straying,Delving head first into the swirl.Thought you’d left those tricky islands far beyond,But as the earth is roundThe horizon always brings them back,Or maybe you are the crook that gathers them up,Recreating erratic loops that don’t ever flatten.

Stumble on reefed obstaclesBecause you still can’t walk in a straight line, Just hover over the same holes,Forget why you were set To circle the blank spots.

You’re left navigating the double-bent question marks,They coil and swim; and every trackIs a flash of golden fire,Colliding in spectacular lines over your head,As everything seems to be spiralling and missing (Your watch, rings, conviction, dignity),Repeating the sequence of movements Trying to get out of the whirpool but still There isn’t a drop to drink,Or never enough.

Eyes parched, throat glazed,In a slimy puddle still alive,You can’t look yourself straight in the eye, Even in a reflection on the heavily-mirrored sunglasses It’s narrowed and rippled,Clipped by the squint of a crossbow’s eye.

But you cover yours instead and just wail YES, Yes to everything that will get you away From the wrenched frame of mind,Mumbling to itself at uncertain hoursAbout the heart burning despite the tale,About nature rebelling with the sameProcesses that should concern everything but I,Bent waves washing up interferingly high.Will you please still idolise me, after seeing me bend and spin?

Wake up in a puddle, Throat parched, eyes glazed,The Nightmare Life-in-Death waves,And a thousand thousand slimy thingsLive on; and so do I.

Meanwhile the city outside is still sleepy and muted, Like it was right after dawn, Just like you entirely unaware of what’s been going on, Of the sea movements undertaken Already during the hot and copper bloody sky

And gradually as you try to stumble your way Back to the steering wheel The panic steadies and you find you can operate this course, The devil knows how to row!

You take a big gulp and become so full of itIt seems there was never anything before, And your destination has always beenBent and out of line.Delusions of grandeur overcome the guilt, But the jittering continues,And your fingers can’t hold the ropes still.

You forget the plain lands before the concrete shore, Before the solar panels and the albatross, Like they are white crows, Rare as hen’s teeth, Their white flags filling the blank spots announcing defeat.

You greet your evil self warmly and fall into step, It mingles strangely with your fears,Yet it feels like a welcoming.Its reappearance an exciting secret You can smile to yourself about while walking the streets.And, having once turned round, you walk on and turn no more your head,The bond and bend only continues;You turn so many corners you don’t know where the wave ends.

Yorgos Loizos – Olympia

an essay by Hollie Kearns

Naked mannequin torsos, an entanglement of artificial body parts, a slipper shaped

shadow, a delicate branch of thorns, shadows and ledges, the body parts of decapitated

dolls are all to be found in this exhibition of work by Yorgos Loizos. An architecture

graduate, Loizos uses black and white photography to re-articulate the space of the

built environment, in particular the urban shop front, capturing within it the eerie traces

of artificial life. He creates spectral traces of inhumanity on built spaces, some of them

constructed specifically as photographic sets. The spectral trace is reanimated through

photographic reproduction and made increasingly insecure by the visceral traces of the

alchemical change through the photographic process.

Loizos develops and explores the constructed reality of the staged photograph and the

unknowing fictional space we create with dolls and mannequins, who are themselves

mere copies of human life. Many artists have explored the traces of human life and

histories left on the physical environment but Loizos has chosen to explore not just

human life but our often fantastical relationship with the potentiality of life within

inanimate objects.

Mannequins are here seen as the location of desire, not as the paraders of shop wears

but as the objects of desire themselves. Loizos had many artistic and literary references

as the background to this exhibition. Literary works and novels in which the protagonist

unwittingly falls in love with an inanimate cyborg, or automat such as Der Sandmann by

E.T.A. Hofmann and ‘L’Eve Future’ by Comte Villiers de l’Isle-Adam1 particularly highlight

a history of tension between humans and the objects we create in our own likeness

and for the fulfilment of our own desires; be they romantic, sexual, or consumer desires.

With the mannequin or doll, we have created a perfect/imperfect replica, and we view

them within the same macabre spectacle as the ‘freak shows’ of New York’s Coney

Island, once they are isolated from their designated context. The mannequin, the dolls,

the artificial flowers, and so on, in Loizos’s works become then, indexical materials to

the unreality of the storefront life and by extension to the relationship we have to the

inanimate surrounds which serve us.

1 Specifically referenced during conversation with the artist and the author.

Paying attention to the way in which the built environment has broadened the

spectacle of the mannequin, or the artificial and industrial icon, Loizos’s photographs

draw us into the particular and to the murky details of overlooked but very public

spaces. Alluding, quite specifically to this American vaudeville, ‘freak show’ tradition,

Loizos’s photographs carry a certain discomfort about the continued nature of our

relationship with the shop front, echoing Benjamin’s infamous Arcades Project.

In his Arcades Project Benjamin sites the architecture of the passages, Hausmann’s

Parisian shopping streets, as the site for exploring society’s tempering of the modes of

human perception1. Through the projects which produced the series of photographs

in this exhibition Loizos elevates the ordinary, the overlooked, the uncomfortably

unmentioned nudity displayed in shop fronts, the exhibition spaces of the urban

landscape.

Individual images are often laid over each other in these photographs, overlapping the

lonely images of isolated scenarios to change their context. New images arise from the

overlaying but yet capacities for interpretation, definition or even legibility are obscured

and made difficult by this layering. An internal frame defines the shape of the image

and highlights the trace of the alchemical photographic process, now visible on the

surface of the images. The deliberate use of black and white photography is due to the

particularities of the development process which provides a greater capacity for the

artist to create and refine the finished photograph. Each photograph then becomes an

individually rendered artwork, subject to the hand of the artist, through art’s most basic

definitions each work now becomes a painting, an unrepeatable event, further throwing

our definitions of human perception and the way we create our visual environments

into disarray.

The attractive and nostalgic, doubly exposed, black and white photography with it’s

romantic play of light and shadow, belies the complexity of the subject matter and

visual thesis of this exhibition. These photographs have the potential to bring awareness

to the urban environment we inhabit and to the way we negotiate this environment.

Loizos’s work furthers the dialogue between architecture and photography and the

capacity either, or both, media have to affect changes and draw out the nuances of the

other.

1 Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press, 2002

Curated by Freddy Tuppen and Kevin Green

Many thanks to all those who have made this exhibition possible:

Jack Hesketh

Roger Hart

Aoife Leach

Marta Owczarek

Hollie Kearns

Stuart Munro

Augustus Veinoglou

Eve Smith

Yiannis Andreadakis

The Bartlett School of Architecture

The Slade School of Art

Metro Imaging

Peroni Italy

Yorgos Loizos | Olympia

20th June - 17th September, 2011

40 Store Street,London WC1E 7DB

www.ssespace.co.uk

For more information contact info@ssespace.co.uk

S P A C ESSE