| Belfast seems a familiar city. It is represented in all media as a unique example of intractable disorder among cities of the modern world, an anomalous site of sectarian conflict in a civilised European order. John Duncan's photography offers a narrative alternative to this city of dissolution. It is visionary of Belfast's future, deconstructing the quotidian metropolis of the Peace Process, the ceasefires, and the influx of capital investment, that have transfigured the urban cityscape of the last decade. Boom Town, Duncan's current work, finds Belfast between loss and redemption, transient through a redefinition of cultural, social and material values in process of transforming the city. Boom Town assembles images that chart the such change. A central image of the Odyssey entertainment centre, the centerpiece of docklands development in Belfast, asks the fundamental questions of civic governance - an odyssey to where, a journey to what? Political architects do not know. To confirm this, Samson and Goliath, the two cranes of Harland and Woolff, the shipbuilders, haunt the background, lost. As a symbol of Belfast's modern day transformation from industrial to post-industrial city this image cannot be bettered, the architect's dream of a brighter future still a sketch, like our political agreement, on a landscape that needs radical social, as class, cultural and political redevelopment. Such concerns inform Duncan's identification of the virtual surgery the modern economy carries out to fulfil its dream of future resolution, as a second image sees a tree transplanted, transported full grown to its new site by the docks, to make accessible the new corporate vision of a city at ease with itself, allowing its citizens a space to grow. Duncan observes this process with an ironic eye; that the tree of liberty comes to us now full grown, not nurtured from seed, tells us something of the fragility of our present institutions. Fundamentally, John Duncan's work tries, after Derrida, to find a new 'cosmopolitics', to find spaces where ideas homeless in Belfast's previous image can begin to find a place in which to redefine what we mean by the city, its culture and expression. It imagines those new 'forms of solidarity', as Derrida again has it, in process of invention, those bonds of civility, that grow, or not, from a city, as an art, reimagined in a photography visionary, silent, radical. |
