Exorcise the Bridge @Eastham Rake

This exorcism was declaimed, with help from the audience, during the opening of the exhibition Affect Bridge Age Regression at Cubitt Gallery, London, on the evening of 3 June, 2017. The title refers to a technique used in hypnotherapy to associate recurrent bodily feelings back to an original memory: once brought back, the recollection can be vivified — in theory at least. The installation at Cubitt comprised a large model bridge, a series of related posters (including the one on the last page of this Bulletin), and a recording of the present text set to music, all bathed in the diffuse yellow of the same sodium streetlamps used to light British streets a generation or so ago. It all amounts to an exploration of Leckey’s childhood memory of a motorway bridge/underpass that has become a haunting presence in his recent work. This “hungry ghost standing at the very end of the 20th century” still exists on the outskirts of Birkenhead close to where Leckey grew up on the Wirral Peninsula west of Liverpool. He describes the bridge as nostalgically attached to him —“like an out-of-sight body part or a chimera’s mutated limb acting as a conduit for memory, technology, and somatic effect.” The exorcism is an attempt to get it out of his system for good. Given that a full glossary of the exorcism’s references would run longer than the exorcism itself, we point you instead to the nearest search engine. Quote: More a song than a video, an attempt to cast out the ever-present past that haunts me, haunts the UK, haunts vimeo. Sound mix by Steve Hellier. Respect to the Fugs and their Exorcising the Evil Spirits from the Pentagon .