Next Meeting: The car park of the plywood factory, just north of the town of Tolhóin …  (2008)

Next Meeting: The car park of the plywood factory, just north of the town of Tolhóin …  (2008)

Image: Tashkent, Pioneer Camp, 1967, by unknown tourist.
Text: Insight Guide Argentina, 1991
Flyposted onto a single billboard on the coastal path between St Ives and Zennor, Cornwall, UK.

Commissioned by Tate St Ives as part of Adam Chodzko, Proxigean Tide at Tate St Ives, May –Sept 2008.
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For the Next Meeting… series Chodzko uses tourists’ ‘amateur’ photographic images taken on their travels in the 1950’s – early 1980’s and recorded on 35mm slide film, from a large archive that he has collated. These images were originally partly taken to show proof of the photographer/tourist’s proximity to a place, a presence to then be shared through a deferred performance to their friends and family, once home.  35mm positive film could also be seen as being more materially present in the camera (as opposed to a negative used to then make a print) at that exact moment in time and space as the existence of the image. It was there!  They were there!  Chodzko selects the images according to their capacity to show a particular place in the world whilst demonstrating some evidence of ‘amateurism’  – a wonky angle or a strange composition etc.  He also chooses images that indicate evidence of their specific historical moment (eg: through clothes fashions or a car design etc) and even evidence of political changes*. There is also a sense of transition, or loss, in the film’s image quality in terms of colour, grain, scratches and degradation.  
Chodzko then juxtaposes these images with a text; travel directions to particular locations (that might exist as a ‘convenient meeting place’), extracted from out-of-date tourist guides published during this same period. Although the details of these directions were accurate at the time of their publishing, Chodzko now chooses them because at least some of their elements have become obsolete; names have changed, businesses have altered etc. They seem to no longer exist in the present, at least through any internet search.
So, the Next Meeting… series is a return to two particular places, two moments in time, documented through picture and text, but now ‘fading’ materially, spatially, temporarily.  Brought together as an edition of lithographic posters each work in the series has just one location in the world where it is exhibited (by flyposting), in a remote but public place. There’s the place of the image, the place of the text, and the place of the flyposting with the dialogue – a migration – between them catalysed by the disparity of their associations;  A series of folds, loops, a collage, a hyperstition, a form of poem creating a vibration between three sites and moments that were definitely there, and yet somehow manage to partially and precariously remain suspended in a state of there/here. The works are made from a drawing together that elicits a sense of loss, melancholia, absurdity, and surreality. Who will attend this meeting in the future? Is it open to all of us?  As with so much of Chodzko’s practice the work explores the space that opens up with an event that is ‘next’, existing in a state of imminence, yet can also be in relation to specific time and places that are now long gone?
It is about being suspended between these places which are other, and yet whose words and imagery combine to make a new space (and time) that feels somehow, but impossibly, familiar: I know this place! 

From Lisa Le Feuvre, Not Failing in Adam Chodzko Proxigean Tide, 2008, Tate Publishing.
During Chodzko’s exhibition at Tate St Ives, on the path that will take you from St Ives to Zennor, a billboard incongruously collides with museum-goers, dog walkers, ramblers, tourists, locals. A person can easily claim all of those identities – all individuals self identify as befits or contests any situation. The image shows a group of school children gathering together with two teachers – the temperature is warm, there is a feeling of optimism from a past moment, maybe even a past ideology. Two banners are lifted high – one an image of a man, proudly patriotic rendered in socialist realist perfection, the other a text that could be Cyrillic. The text again gives a set of instructions for a meeting: “next meeting: the car park of the plywood factory, just north of the new town of Tolhóin, on the western edge of the Lago Fagna, after taking the Rura 3 southwards along the Río Ewan, Tierra Del Fuego”.
The source of the image and text of this poster currently located on the coastal path, as with the other meeting announcements, are actually from the artist’s collection of other people’s tourist slides and his archive of obsolete tourist guides. Each pronouncement, be it in text or image, has a specific location that can be cited: this one, for example is at a pioneer camp in Tashkent in 1964 in a park dedicated to an astronaut. When juxtaposed with an instruction that alludes to deforestation, road travel and industrial production meaning becomes obfuscated. Just like the blogger Lizzie McNeely found*, it really is of very little help to have such information. There is nothing definitive being shown or said, no authority, only proposals for engaged thought.
*Cf: Lisa Le Feuvre text

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Next Meeting: Opposite the main entrance to the Ordzhonikidze Health Centre, the Sochi-Matzesta resort…   2007. [Image: Pakistan, 1978.  Text: Russia, 1958. Flyposted around Toronto, 2007]
Next Meeting: The foyer of the Hagens Hotel, Måløy, Sogn og Fjordane, on the island of Vågsøy…     2007.  [Image: Mexico City, 1973. Text: Norway, 1975.  Flyposted onto a hoarding, Balbutcher Lane, Ballymun, Dublin 11, Ireland.]
Next Meeting: The car park of the plywood factory, just north of the town of Tolhóin … 2008   [Image: Tashkent, 1967.  Text: Tierra Del Fuego, 1991.   Flyposted onto a single billboard on the coastal path between St Ives and Zennor, Cornwall.]
Next meeting: Beside the TV transmitter on the highest part of Szechenyi Hill…2010  [Image: Haiti, 1971. Text: Budapest, 1967. Flyposted around Esperidon Square, Glyfada, Athens, 2010.]
Next meeting: In the entrance to the Golf-Club restaurant, past the Konak, in the Košutnjak Park… 2011. [Image: Ecuador,1968. Text: Yugoslavia, 1966. Flyposted on the ground floor windows of Hafenstrasse 23, 60327 Frankfurt am Main,
Germany, 2011.]

A direct precursor to the series is: Looper  (2003)  [Image: Stockholm. Text: Haiti. Flyposted onto a single billboard hoarding in Turin]
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The Next meeting… series intersects with many elements of Chodzko’s practice involving assembling, signalling, announcing and transmitting forms of ‘loops’ into public space, ranging from Reunion; Salò (1998), Meetings of people with stammers to describe a fire (1999-), Better Scenery (2000 – ), We love you here, even though you are there (2012),  Runners (2013) etc.  As with Better Scenery (2000 – ),  Ants Choose Position for Sequins – 2 Seconds Interval  (2003),  White Magic (2005), Pattern for a Procession with Two Masks (2007) Because… (2013) and   O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix  (2020) etc,  Next meeting…operates in the vibrating space between two apparently disconnected sites apparently communicating with each other.