Down Low and Living the High Life
Merlin Betts reviews High Rise Connecting Conversations, a European Cultural Foundation/EUNIC-funded installation by partners: ExploreTheArch Theatre Company in Hastings, and Seria project in Kyiv, with the co-operation of Hastings Borough Council. It ran at Stade Hall from 27 to 31 December 2022.
Last time I was at Stade Hall it felt like a tiny flight hanger or a fishy Smithfields repurposed. Bright pale lights, stalls – open and spacious but also crammed. A bit malicious somehow. The noise was the white noise of buying and selling. It was raining outside, which it was this time too.
You might not immediately think of a high rise as being comfortable. You see it in the distance and, if you don’t live there, it can seem stark, cold, like that pale light of modernity that failed to start. In a way it’s easy to forget that the tower is a home – many homes stacked up together.
This time at Stade Hall, dark. The way a candle is dark. I was welcomed in, given a handbook. The drama of the hall’s high ceiling was softened by the low light. Columns of pictures looked like the foundation holding up an invisible world above. The installation came across quite simple; as I walked in, I saw cardboard and string, was funnelled towards a comfy chair in front of a TV – the scene that’s been a classic marker of the modern home since before shows like the Simpsons immortalised it. I noticed a background din but couldn’t pay much attention to what it was saying, just that it was plain speech rather than negotiation.
Turning a corner around the columns, words began to materialise, “lacks nature,” and I immediately saw the absence of green in the hall; “while I hate this place at the same time I really love it”. I settled on a video presentation: residents of a panelka in Kyiv talking about the homes they grew up in and live in, the need to bring countryside with them in planters or rustic furnishings. The “unaesthetic appearance” and lack of privacy in their modern block residences. For a moment they sound like refugees fleeing their homes into their homes…as though there was something necessarily nomadic about living close with so many people.
Other video presentations were set up opposite benches around the Hall, and the heart of the installation for me became this journey from bench to bench, following the sound as much as the visuals. The first bench lulled me into a dreamy, sleepy state, “I can feel the flat when it moves in the wind” but the murmurs about the room still rose and fell, prodding me awake and drifting back in waves. The chaos of life, surrounded by thin walls and an incessant whistle of the air passing by.
The next bench shook me awake and shouted. There was nothing too loud or angry on the screen but the soundscape had changed, become hostile. I panicked but stayed sat. I thought about my neighbours howling up through the floor, or in through the vent in the wall: having a domestic. Then I’d open my door directly onto theirs and he’d greet me with a smile as he left with the dog, and I didn’t know whether to seem sympathetic or critical or what; just deflated and stupid and scurried away. I couldn’t sit at the bench any longer and moved on to the final sound space.
Breathing. Something like a harp plays – some sweet strings – and apart from the occasional whip of discord, the place is calm again. The panic is banished to the background din I can hear just below the strings and calm reflections on Hastings’ Four Courts: little moments of daily life, high above the rest of the world but safe in a body of people.
Frank Moon’s sound design really made the installation: took me off guard and brought me right into the middle of the spaces and concepts that the whole show was about. Apart from the sound, video, pictures, there were a series of interactive exhibits. A mock-up kitchen (using the hall’s kitchenette) where you had the grounding experience of hanging socks up high. A miniturised rubbish chute that perfectly mimicked the noise of rubbish tumbling down many floors. And a weighted elevator model – that artery of transportation in the tower.
Rumbling beneath this exploration of modern urban living was the war. Residents’ introspective journeys were cut short by mentions of missiles, sirens and bomb shelters. It didn’t interfere enough to eclipse the main topic, but it was a serious presence.
High Rise Connecting Conversations ran alongside events in other Culture of Solidarity cities including Athens, Paris, Glasgow, Madrid and Warsaw. Culture of Solidarity is a European Cultural Foundation project that’s been funding collaborative enterprises since 2020, initially in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Lately it’s launched a European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC) fund to specifically respond to events in Ukraine.
Find out more about the project’s team and funders at explorethearch.com.
Life in the High Rise: in the Residents’ Own Words
Hastings Four Courts
Bert
Here I’m on the 15th floor. Lovely view, can see Eastbourne on a good day. So I can go out and , you know, sit, on the balcony, have a smoke and just watch the world go by. Weather-wise, the flats when they were built, they’ve got a lean tolerance of 5% either way. They’re meant to have, with the wind. But I can feel the flat when it moves – it doesn’t worry me, I’m used to it. It’s like a reed in the wind, if it doesn’t bend in the wind, it breaks.
At the moment we’re suffering with a leak coming through one of the lights in the ceiling. We’ve been trying to get that sorted for two months. We’ve had people come out, people check, people go upstairs, it’s not moving forward. Repairs can be a problem at times to get them done.
Christine
I grew up in Lewes Road, and we used to play where they are now. It was just open land. All of us kids, we were quite young, we used to play on all the land, and in the woods, fish in the ponds – well, fish: get newts. Then suddenly
one day I thought “this is all being cleared out a bit”, you know, and then we saw, like, boring machines. They started building foundations and digging out… It changed the whole landscape, because they put in paths, and the whole rural thing – the woods and the little field bits, the tin huts – it all just went.
When all four of them were built, my auntie moved in… on the 12th floor. Just to look out of that front room window – it was like you were flying… but I’ve never flown, so wouldn’t know what that was like.
Kyiv
Anna
My privelege is that I live in such a house and don’t look at it. If you look out my window, you won’t see this ugly building, you’ll see a very beautiful building. At some point we were sitting with the girls trying to understand where we live. We have a wonderful apartment, but our privelege is that we live in a very ugly house compared to those around us, and we don’t see it. It’s not renovated, perhaps this is partly why it’s like this. It was abandoned some distant years ago, so it’s like an alien in the centre of the city.
Andrii
I don’t think, I know my neighbours can hear me playing the ukulele. And I feel embarrassed about it; it was embarrassing to learn how to play. The high rises mean relatively cheap and affordable housing for me at the moment. It’s ugly on the outside and often ugly on the inside. It doesn’t mean anything to me – the flats have their own peculiarities that you just have to put up with. Therefore I tried to sing quieter, and over time, of course, I got used to it. Once my neighbours even gave me a compliment, “Oh, you are singing. Are you learning to play?” I say, “Yes.” They say, “You’re doing well.” I thought they flatter me, of course.
Max
I usually hear how the neighbours from above constantly quarrel with each other. The neighbours from the side have loud dogs: on one side the dog is big, on the other small. They always greet me when I come home. The neighbours upstairs like to drag furniture to the window during an air raid siren: I understand. The siren starts and they drag some cabinets to the window, and this terrible sound even resembles the sound of a rocket. Sometimes I get angry with them because of this.
Svitlana
I want to say that we really teamed up during the first few days. About a quarter of the inhabitants of the house remained. It was the same for every building. People united, began to check the roofs, check the entrances, because there were many sabotage groups. The curfew was imposed, so we were staying at home, watching the news, and believing in the Ukrainian military 100%. Only the next day we started doubting. We only went to the basement once; it was very cold there, our parents got sick, and we decided not to go there anymore because the basement is not a bomb shelter. In case of a missile attack, you’ll be buried in the rubble in a mass grave.
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