Investigations on the site

1 The text

Methods: Photographing and note-taking

As I walked into Finsbury Park, I immediately noticed the pink, eye-catching lottery ticket on the ground, torn into halves. Later I collected and captured all the texts from the photographs I took in Finsbury park, which were labeled into 4 groups: 

The first group is ‘graffitis’, by sorting them, I could tell that certain live advices were written by the same person with a pink acrylic pen; The second group is ‘public signs’, it’s interesting to see some are just on the contrary to what people were doing in the park. For instance, one goes with ‘the feeding of pigeons is strictly prohibited in the park‘;  The third group is the ‘packages‘, with brands’ names, promo slogans and edible methods printed on them, which is the most colorful group; The forth group is the one that I didn’t manage to define, so I called them ‘the others’. In this group, you can see text like ‘getting the world moving’, ‘marxism in 20 minutes’ and ‘beautiful people’.

2 The Wind

Method: Recording

It was a windy day at my first visit to Finsbury Park. I recorded things that reflected the existence of the wind on that day. River, people walking with their cloths being blown up, rubbish bags, trees and leaves. And also the sound. Later back home, as I was watching the films, I found these short videos look like a draft of the wind. A draft that brought up questions:

Why is it always the wind in the park that’s comforting and relaxing?
What makes it different from the wind on the street outside of the park?

Click this link to view the short video.

3 The fences

Methods: photographing, sketching and mapping

The most noticeable thing, as I tried to find the boundary of Finsbury Park, is its fences. The boundary is not a closed circle, but a spliced and intermittent line, partitioning the park and the streets outside.

I took notes on different sections and splices of the fences ( with different materials, structures, heights, colors and varying conditions of damage) and screen-captured my own position on Google map. Later that day, I drew a specific map for the fences of Finsbury Park based on all the collected materials.

One specific portion of green fence caught my attention, and maybe this is the direction I would go deeper with my investigation.

Oct 6 2023