WORMWOOD (2015- ongoing) is a long term collaboration between artist Tereza Stehlikova and poet Steve J Fowler.
‘A history of Unnecessary Developments’ an exhibition by Tereza Stehlikova and SJ Fowler.
A long form collaboration between the artist-filmmaker Tereza Stehlikova and artist-poet SJ Fowler takes shape in an exhibition of experimental documentary, found sculpture and abstract writing. Exploring, recording and revealing the environs of industrial West London, this exhibition creates a temporary shrine to overlooked corners, pathways and ley lines of an area of London soon to face major redevelopment. The exhibition includes a feature length film Disappearing Wormwood, 2020, previously shown at the Whitechapel Gallery.
A History of Unnecessary Developments, 2021
Disappearing Wormwood, 2020
A cinematic witnessing (63 mins, 2020) of London living through aberrant, awkward, ugly change, but mostly dying in the process. Filmed over the last half decade, exploring the overlooked aesthetic power of Willesden Junction, Wormwood scrubs, Kensal Green Cemetery and The Grand Union Canal, the film strives to see a closer place, alien, idiosyncratic and yet familiar. It enters into dialogue with its genius loci, capturing and preserving on camera and in word, before it is transformed beyond recognition by the notorious incoming Old Oak redevelopment. The film is part of an ongoing creative collaboration between poet Steven J Fowler and filmmaker Tereza Stehlikova, a project which also includes poetry publications, an exhibition and various public events.
“Let’s listen tonight to Willesden Junction together” said John Berger in his letter to film-maker Tereza Stehlikova, in 2014, when she had told him she had moved to the area, thinking of his writing about it in Railtracks. This film aims to honour that statement, carrying the aesthetic of walking home late, or waiting for a train, imagining him there, in shots without discernible people, many years back, as an art student.
As this hopeless industrial zone started to feel like a home to both Stehlikova and Fowler, who explored it as a means of collaborating, they began experience the expansive landscape as a gift, its ugliness transformed into an expression of freedom. Together the makers hatched a plan to start exploring and documenting, later fuelled by the knowledge of the planned redevelopment, the comically nefarious Old Oak development, threatening to swallow up all that they had grown to love.
The film is a a kind of ritual, often meandering, meditative, limping from documentary to invention, minimalism to maximalism, starting without an exact goal, propelled by the joy of simply being in a place, not knowing where it might take us.
Trailer to the feature-length film:
Tereza Stehlíková 