![]() Between drinking and setting things in fire, Lowry did manage to complete his classic Under the Volcano here. The English author Malcolm Lowry spent six years in one of these shacks. ‘There was this law that no-one owned the land that appeared between low and high tide,’ says Douglas. Mostly of working class neighbourhoods, a hotel squatted by soldiers returned from the Second World War, shoreline shacks and boathouses. ‘They are a study of shelter,’ he continues. ‘The places aren’t there anymore and there’s no light.’ ‘It’s taking a photograph you can’t really take,’ says Douglas. These are impossible ‘photographs’ of a disappeared physical landscape at night (no reproduction can do justice to the windows onto illuminated rooms or moon shadows). Douglas then used them in his neo-noir cinematic stage-play Helen Lawrence. These images are hi-res’d re-worked versions of images used in Douglas’ ‘Circa 1948’ smartphone app, which allowed users to wander the streets of Vancouver and pull up remarkable 3-D renders of his or her exact location exactly as it was in 1948. This is a place and time Douglas has summoned up and revisited before. You are in the middle of the action and you have to decide how to piece it together.’ĭownstairs at Miro meanwhile are a series of remarkable digital renderings of the Vancouver – Douglas’ home city – of 1948. And you decide who you pay attention to the person talking, or the person listening. Some characters are stuck in the middle, others at either end, some cross them all. The street is the interface between governance and private space. ![]() ‘But one pair of screens is governance, another pair is private space and another is the street. ‘Two things are always going on simultaneously,’ says Douglas. Mostly the characters talk at each other, rather stagily, playing their parts in what will inevitably become a tragedy of conflicting ideas about ends and means.Īt least two or more screens play at any one time. ![]() Douglas is brilliant at patina and historical detail, cigarette smoke and cigarette-yellowed teeth and hair. People have very different ideas of what is meant by this simple act of violence.’ĭouglas moves his characters from screen to screen, around sets – a cinema-come-book store, a bar, a wonderful modernist government building and occasionally outdoors. In this context a terrorist means very different things to different people, on the giving and receiving end. ‘And in Portugal after the revolution, there were extreme left wing groups and right wing groups doing all sorts of bombings. ‘The novel is really the first literary presentation of terrorism and many of the things in it are still prevalent today,’ he says. They were scared that a communist government might take control.’ĭouglas is also interested in looking at terrorism, reading Conrad forward into Portugal circa 1975 and then on into our own age of terror. This terrified America who put warships off the coast of Portugal. ‘Eventually it became a conventional Western democracy but it had the potential to become almost anything at the time. They were trying to figure out what sort of government they wanted. ‘Portugal had been through 30 years of fascism,’ explains Douglas, ‘and was suddenly in this state of openness and flux. In Douglas’ version, the ambassador is American and the target is a Marconi trans-Atlantic telephone exchange. In the original novel, set in 19th century London, the ambassador of a foreign power, almost certainly Russia, enlists an anarchist on its pay roll to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, an assault on time and Britain’s sense of imperial order. The Secret Agent, a new work showing at Victoria Miro’s east London mothership, is a six-screen full length drama looking at the aftermath of the fall of the dictator Salazar in Portugal in the mid-1970s, and the short-lived ‘carnation revolution’ that followed.ĭouglas moves the action of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent to this particular time and place or as Douglas tells Wallpaper*, ‘historical time suspended in some way’. These re-routed histories are not just playful counterfactuals but examinations of particular moments of hope and possibility what concrete goodness might have come out that hope had it not crushed or derailed. The Canadian multi-media artist Stan Douglas deals in what he calls ‘speculative histories’.
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