Swandown

source: sugarhousestudioscouk

Filmmaker Andrew Kotting and writer Iain Sinclair have been collaborating on Swandown, a film and arts project documenting their journey from Hastings to Hackney in a swan pedallo using Sussex and Kent waterways. Here is a chance to see clips from the film, planned for release later in 2012, and the two filmmakers discussing the project. Also screening will be a selection of short films by Andrew Kotting, including his previous collaboration with Sinclair Offshore (UK, 2006) about an attempt to swim the English Channel, and Sinclair will be reading from his book Ghost Milk, his powerful statement on the throwaway impermanence of the present with projects such as The Millennium Dome, the Thames Gateway and ultimately the Olympic Park.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: southlondonartmap

In London’s Olympic year, CGP london present Swandown – The Installation which is a project
of Herculean proportions by two of Britain’s most creative individuals: film-maker Andrew Kötting
and writer Iain Sinclair.

Swandown is a plot of Olympian ambition. A poetic film-diary about encounter and culture an endurance
test and pedal-marathon. Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair pedalled a swan-shaped pedalo from the seaside
in Hastings to Hackney in East London, via the inland waterways. The journey provided multifarious
outcomes; a film work, pinhole photographs, sound recordings and numerous texts and artefacts.

Swandown – The Installation will be a deconstruction and re-presentation of this epic journey. Within the
cavernous confines of Dilston Grove the pedalo itself will be presented complete with the knocks and
bruises of its difficult journey together with selected film sequences from the voyage, sounds, pinhole
photographs and many of the artefacts collected en-route. It is a celebration of The Waterbound
Pilgrimage, welcoming difficulty and celebrating local particulars, ever alert to the traces of submerged
histories; songs, civil protest, and the wilderness, through both the real and the imagined.

Swandown is the third in a series of collaborations between Kötting and Sinclair, the first of which
produced Offshore; a cross channel swim project. Notions of ‘the psyche and its geography’ have
cemented their friendship and brought the artists together to realise this project.