The Rings of Saturn

　The place seemed beyond time, or a place where time had ceased to flow. It was a liminal zone, a wasteland that extended from the old road to the shore of the grey river. Beyond the pebble and concrete-block strewn strip of shore lay an expanse of mud, bisected by deep channels cut by the outflows from concrete pipes and the water from muddy streams that flowed down the rock and clay banks. The skeletal remains of navigation buoys stood stark against the grey clouds, vertical lines in the series of horizontal planes produced by mud, river and the sky.

On days when fog descended there was no indication of the industries on the farther shore, and the area took on the appearance of an echo of some future time, when all that will remain will be the ruins of unknown structures at the edge of a lifeless sea, and we became like travelers transported to the entropic end of the earth.

The memory of that shore haunts me, and it returns when I discover other sites that appear like the fossils of some yet to occur event. The present becomes refracted through the lens of memory, and each new ruin seems to reflect the myriad images of previous places, extending the present into a ruin-filled past, and the future filling with the ghostly shadows of ruins yet to come.

These ruins reflect a greater decay, the collapse of social structures, the demise of dreams, the fail of utopias, as capital flees to find new resources, both human and natural, to exploit. It is common to remark on the rise and fall of empires, and cities, and indeed history itself, are built on the ruins of empires. Now the prevailing empire is not one built that is a geographic or narrowly-political entity, but it is one built on a belief in a system, a financial regime of exploitation and division. The ruins that litter the landscape are the increasing signs of the coming collapse of the Empire of Finance, reflections from the future of our present as an unrecoverable past.

Duncan Mountford

Still fromThe Rings of Saturn 2014　

Left : ordinary facts arranged within time,
Various materials, including hand-made slide projectors, 35mm photographic slides,
timber, lights, curved panels with red linen. Size: 450cm x 450cm x 250cm. 2000

Right:The Problem of Knowledge,
Various materials, including found school desks, mirrors, magnifying lenses,
two single-channel videos with sound, 35mm photographic slides. Dimensions variable. 2010

website : duncan-mountford.moonfruit.com

e-mail: duncphd@yahoo.co.uk