#and they both have some nice juxtapositions going on and i think their stands exemplify that pretty well

[avspol]

Ok so. Stands are always tied in some way to what kind of a person the user is right, whether that means it's related to their personality (Joseph is analytical and tricky so his stand can be used to find information others can't see, DIO wants to exert control over anything and everything in the world so he can do so by stopping time, etc.) or who they physically are as a person (Hol Horse is a cowboy so he has a gun, Rohan is a manga artist so he can turn people into books, etc.)

but. theres Two people i really dont get. so, since you are an Avdol and Bruno Expert and have probably thought about these dudes enough to fill a library, i figured i'd ask. How do fire and zippers relate to these two??? i honestly have got nothing

OKAY i have lots of thoughts about this and some of it is probably me overanalysing stuff. but that’s one of my favourite things to do ever.

for avdol, i think magician’s red is definitely representative of avdol’s emotions. he tries to present himself as logical and calm but meanwhile! the literal actual personification of his soul shows the emotionally impulsive, hot-headed and passionate side of himself. there’s also a theme of fire as reincarnation going on here: magician’s red’s design is similar to both a phoenix (continuously reborn from the ashes) and ra, the falcon-headed egyptian sun god (who dies and is reborn each day as the sun moves through the sky). this mirrors avdols return from the 'dead', which is pretty much the key plot point in his storyline.

and bruno!! zippers (particularly the way bruno uses them) have two main functions: separating things and bringing them back together. separation is a theme in bruno’s backstory (especially his parents divorce, his father’s death etc) and also likely in how he needs to compartmentalise the different sides of his life, as an inherently kind person who’s involved in a criminal organisation (please please read disjoint by queenieofaces on ao3. my very favourite bruno analysis fic and it touches on a lot of this). but he also brings things together, especially visible through his team - forming a new family from those that have been torn apart :')

[tania-ostanina]

04: Silvertown and the Thames

Short summary:

My visit to Silvertown, East London:

Exploring the richness of Silvertown’s industrial past and the fragmented nature of its present-day make-up

Exploring the potential for our smart city proposal for this area

Reflecting on how London forgets its past: my quest to find the memorial to the Silvertown’s industrial explosion of 1917

The physical presence of the river at low tide

Juxtaposition of the messy and small-scale with the clean, new and large (the High Line)

Urban ecology of the site

Image-making of Silvertown:

Describing the ‘ineffable’ in different ways

An imagined memorial to the victims of the Silvertown explosion in someone’s living room

A map of my walk through Silvertown - conveying the sensory experience and feel of the walk

Way forward / a postcard for Silvertown:

The river’s layers

An ‘anti-High Line’ - a small scale, ‘dumb’ approach

Death and the forgotten story of the explosion

The river retains memories of past events

Read more:

Our classroom session for week 3 was about image-making in design and research. It was an insightful session, with many inspiring themes such as a talk by Anab Jain of Superflux describing how to construct possible futures using the medium of images and physical installations. Anab talked about image as a craft and about how ideas are generated through the process of making them, stressing that image-making is by its nature political.

At the same time, I developed an interest in East London’s Silvertown after a conversation with a member of my Creativity group. We both saw potential in this area of London, with the richness of its industrial past and the fragmented nature of its present-day makeup, into which our smart city could perhaps slot in.

I decided to pay Silvertown a visit, armed with fresh ideas about image-making from our classroom session. My aim was to get a feel of the area and to document my chosen path through it in a series of photographs. When I arrived at West Silvertown DLR, I did not have a predetermined plan, but knew that I wanted to find one particular landmark – a memorial to Silvertown’s industrial explosion of 1917 – in which 50 tons of TNT in a wartime munitions factory blew up, killing 73 people, injuring 400, and laying waste to the entire area.

I assumed that the memorial would be standing at the original location of the old munitions factory. Upon arrival, I discovered a brand new Royal Wharf residential quarter built right on top of where I believed the location of the memorial should have been. There was no sight of the memorial anywhere. Circling around the quarter, I eventually stumbled across a little park with a view of the river. There it was - the memorial! Yet the surrounding context did not match the historic pictures I had seen online, so I concluded that the memorial must have been moved from its original location. Most likely, one of these nice new residential buildings now stood directly on top of where the explosion had happened.

Image: The relocated memorial against the backdrop of the new Royal Wharf Development

The juxtaposition of the small memorial stone with the crisp lines of the 14-story building in the background, to me, exemplified so much of this part of the city, and indeed of London as a whole. London ebbs and flows and in the act of ebbing and flowing it forgets its past, although sometimes – as in this case – there are feeble attempts to maintain its past’s chosen snippets. I wondered how many current residents even noticed this small stone, and knew and cared about what it represented? I imagined that the estate agent whom I saw on a balcony showing around a young Asian family, was unlikely to tell them that they were about to buy a flat built on the former site of London’s largest and deadliest explosion.

I walked on, having documented my thoughts in a series of photographs. I then chose to take a walk to the Thames Barrier, stopping by the river to admire the glistening silt at low tide.

Image: Thames Barrier Park with the river at low tide

Just east of the Barrier, the giant mass of the still active Tate & Lyle refinery loomed, with a ship parked beside it, busy loading goods. Its bustling activity contrasted starkly with the abandoned Tate&Lyle building I had seen earlier by West Silvertown DLR, which had fences all around it and was covered in signs by a construction company, no doubt ready to be converted into flats.

Image: The Tate&Lyle abandoned factory (left) and their working factory visible in the distance (right)

Walking back west, I shot past the West Silvertown DLR to pay a brief visit to the old Tetley Building, previously a brewery, now used as artists’ studios. The site surrounding the building felt rough around the edges, disparate, patchworky. Numerous odd, small businesses nestled in the space under the adjacent motorway – undoubtedly rent here must be cheap by London’s standards!

Image: One of the businesses below the motorway adjacent to the Tetley Building

The giant silhouette of the Emirates High Line dominated the area, looming overhead, strangely out of place and alien. The elevated DLR line spoke a similar language of enormous scale and engineering achievement, in contrast with the tiny, messy human activity below it. In between all this, at ground level, patches of urban landscape were creeping into every crevice and every available space they could find.

Image: Abandoned urban landscape occupying the inaccessible space surrounding one of the giant pillars of the High Line

Image: View of the High Line from inside the Tetley building

“What about urban ecology?” I wondered. I knew that Silvertown was haven for black redstarts, the endangered British birds who prefer to live on urban brownfield sites. While there are protective measures in place for the preservation of black redstarts in London, they inevitably get driven out by new developments such as the Royal Wharf. There were probably many other species of urban animal here, too. And of course, some plant species especially favour sites likes these. During my walk, I spotted a number of buddleia bushes, famous for their ability to grow in derelict urban spaces.

A few days later, while sorting through the photos I had taken, I had a vision come into my head of the young Asian family whom I had seen on the balcony earlier, moving into their new flat at Royal Wharf, unpacking their boxes and enjoying a view of the Thames through the full height windows of their living room. But all the while, a parallel reality unfolded all around them. In my vision, the memorial was not a small stone but a collection of giant rays of powerful light – one for each person who had died – somehow shooting from the ground right through the new building, through the floor of the living room, and up into the sky. Simultaneously, urban nature was allowed to unfold here, unhindered by the new architecture that had been built on top of it. There were black redstarts flying around the living room; hedgehogs were hiding under the sofa; insects were crawling all over the kitchen floor. Yet the young family moved through this apparition, entirely unaware of it. If they knew, would they do anything differently? Or would they remain unperturbed and just go about their usual business?

Image: My Photoshop of an imagined memorial to the victims of the Silvertown Explosion of 2017, as seen inside a living room at Royal Wharf.

Image: A map I’ve put together showing the location of the photographs I had taken during my walk.

The two images above are my alternative ways of telling the story of Silvertown. Both are attempting to describe the ‘ineffable’ - as suggested by Gillian Rose in her article, Visual research methods in an expanded field: what next for visual research methods? - but are doing so in different ways. The map image is my attempt to convey “the sensory experience and feel of urban environments” (Rose, 2015), whereas the image of the Royal Wharf living room is that of an imagined alternative reality.

While working on these two images, I became increasingly convinced that our project should be rooted in a particular physical place, where it could contribute directly to the uncovering of the lost stories of London. I dropped a line on Slack to our group, “I’m sold - I think we should do our project here. But is there enough ‘undergroudness’ in it?”

A fellow group member responded, “The Thames has a lot of layers, you can say that the “undergroundness” is related to that.”

I dug out a photo of the river silt at low tide that I had taken earlier. “What does the Thames remember of the explosion?” I wondered, “Is it possible that some of the pieces of the factory might still be sitting down there, buried in the silt?” I thought of mudlarks who might have come across the debris of the accident, but might have chucked them back into the river, unaware of their significance.

I grabbed a postcard that I had picked up at the Tetley Building’s cafe, and quickly drew a diagram on the back it, trying to synthesize my thoughts. “Something about the river’s layers… The High Line is so weirdly out of scale with its surroundings. What if our project is a sort of ‘anti-High Line’ - low-brow and small, but spanning across the river somehow? The red splurge represents death and the forgotten story of the Silvertown explosion, and how the Thames may have retained it as a memory. Something about urban wildlife here too, maybe?” I still had no idea what the actual smart city proposal would be, but this felt like a step in the right direction.