Remixer    (2002)

Remixer    (2002)

5 x A1 ink jet prints, fly-posted, overlapping, to a wall,
and audio system playing Flight, by A Certain Ratio (FAC 22 1980), remixed by filtering through the building materials and architecture existing within Manchester city centre between the Haçienda (built in 1982) nightclub and the site of the IRA bomb explosion in Manchester (1996)

♦

In Remixer Chodzko explores the migration of a favourite piece of music from his teenage years, moving its tune through time and space to encounter the Haçienda nightclub, which he frequented when a student at Manchester University (1985-1988), to meet a return visit he made to Manchester in 1996, just after the IRA bombing had severely shocked and damaged the city.  The regeneration of the city centre after this event included the demolition of the Haçienda to make way for expensive housing. (Crosby Homes, its developer, were widely criticised for using The Haçienda brand name—and featuring the strapline “Now the party’s over…you can come home” in the promotional material.)
Remixer  forms a dream, an attempt to gather together blurred memories of different events connected by the flow of a particular piece of music. The Flight is of teenage imagination, the hedonism of the nightclub, the fragments propelled into the air from the first second of an explosion. The free flow of the dark and melancholic punk/funk music is interrupted, snagged, muted and effected by its passage through an array of building materials and bodies.  The fly-posted posters recycle fragments of imagery from Chodzko’s previous work along with the sound wave of the Flight remix, and a streetmap of the city, creating a route between nightclub and parked van.
Remixer is an attempt by Chodzko to remember a series of personal experiences of a city (as outsider) across time whilst it also exists as a diagram, or mapping, of the desire to empathise with the communities who had a continuous flow of living and working experience of Manchester (free from the clichéd focus on the ‘iconic’).
Chodzko has frequently used the notion of a flow or journey of memory, emotion, attention, vision and bodies in relation to ideas of sleep, dreaming and dying in works such as Secretors (1993 – ) , Pounding Systems    (1994), The woods shall rise up in those places where you pause    (1995) , Limbo Land    (2001) , Night Shift  (2004) , Ghost     (2010 -) , And the City Grew Quiet… (2011) , Knots  (2013) ,  O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix  (2020) , and  Thru hole I blind/O/Thru hole oui see     (2020) etc

♦
Remixer‘s audio element : Flight, (by A Certain Ratio) as mp3

Chodzko has also incorporated an early piece of A Certain Ratio‘s music (Winter Hill, 1981) in:
Design for a Carnival     (2003)
The music from Float 17, as it stops briefly under the fly-over, as it makes its way in to the city   (2003)
♦

Remixer was part of the exhibition ‘Fabrications’, at Cube Gallery, Manchester (along with Chodzko’s The Gorgies’ Centre)
Cf: Mark Crinson, ‘Explaining Urbanism to Wild Animals’ Mute Winter/Spring 2005, pp62-66.