yesterday, after so many nervous walks around it, i finally braved the insides of the mysterious abandoned trailer in shipton-upon-cherwell. i climbed through the door, and with racing heart, walked slowly through the trailer towards the bedroom.. my eyes fixed on these strange blankets atop a mattress at the far end of the room. such a relief i felt when i learned that nobody was there and i was free to explore. i found torn curtain hemms hanging from rails, a giant screwdriver that had been stabbed right through a wardrobe, barbed wire coiled round a rusting bike, holes in the walls, ceilings and floors.. and dust. everywhere a thick dust. and lingering smell of damp.
there was nothing much to salvage here. mostly trash, a few old abba tapes, cutlery, and a rusted pile of dragonfly fairylights.
perhaps the next time i return, i will leave something there instead.
more photographs here
3 comments:
Trailers always are moving, in a way, i think, without playing with words. The word itself always reminds me of "Paris, Texas" - when Nastassja Kinski says the word, it's so powerful and dense. Recently, i also saw another movie with a "trailer character" : Rosetta from the Dardenne brothers, really good Belgian filmmakers. I guess there's a feeling of poverty in the sight of a trailer that's underlined when it's abandoned...
yeah trailers are quite the oddity, in many ways invoking poverty, as you stated earlier, Constantin, as well as bringing to mind a specific mentality or lifestyle... one that in soem ways is hard to escape... Having grown up in a semi-rural area where congregations of trailers are often herded together into trailer parks, or what in a sense, could be considered the lower class version of the suburb. These areas often become the rural equivalent to city "projects." Basically from a sociological standpoint they are a sort of generational cycle that is hard to escape from... and honestly whenever I think of trailers (in a serious manner), they kind of sadden me to a point often invoking a certain nostalgia regarding people I once new who grew up in those places and in many ways never moved beyond, though they dreamed of doing so in the more idyllic days when we were children...
In regards to the lone trailer that Sorrel located and explored... I just give a lot of credit for braving that space... the mystic and taboos that surround abandoned structures of that nature are often a little to creepy for me to handle, my imagination gets carried away before I am simply able to face the reality of the situation... but then looking into the remnants of someones life is rather fascinating as it becomes sort of archaeological in a way... lots of interesting ideas are personally invoked for me in this spatial exploration...
thank you for your words everyone. and with the movie relation.. werner herzog's stroszek.. this was hanging over my mind the whole time.
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