Jamie McGregor Smith has a thing for empty spaces. In the past, the
British photographer has taken his camera to derelict environs as
diverse as Detroit’s auto factories, Laybourne Grange’s abandoned
lunatic asylum and Stoke-on-Trent’s forsaken pottery industry. He
documents the decaying, the crumbling, the once useful - now forgotten.
Recently, it is the un-peopled post-Olympic structures of the 2004
Athenian Games that have attracted his attention. In a new project
titled
Borrow, Build, Abandon – now on display in London – he
turns his gaze on the city’s failed exercise in legacy planning; a site
that now sits almost entirely disused, accruing disrepair - a home for
rogue vegetation, graffiti, even drying laundry. As journalist
Helena Smith
wrote after a visit last May, “Athens's Olympic park, once billed as
one of the most complete European athletics complexes, is no testimony
to past glories. Instead, it is indicative of misplaced extravagance,
desolation and despair.”
McGregor Smith’s documentary series explores this legacy of
destitution “eight years after the games came to a close,” he writes.
“Only three of the twenty-two Olympic stadiums, built at a cost of $15
Billion, are currently in public use, the remaining requiring an annual
£100 million in upkeep costs.”
Lessons on Olympic legacy, highlighted by the Barcelona
and Sydney games, were shadowed in Greece’s case by pressures of
completion and a delayed three-year construction timeline. Caused by
political intervention and government elections, this rush for
completion allowed little thought for post game usage and trebled its
construction budget.
In a moment of our own post-Olympic splendour, it’s no surprise that a
photographer of Smith’s disposition was drawn to Athens. The product of
political floundering, budget cuts and a failed foresight, the
buildings are a government’s failing in colossus – the physical
representation of more nuanced comments on hubris, austerity, and
something McGregor Smith called
industrial entropy – “the
forces that effect the transition and the decay of matter and energy in a
broader sense, evolving economic trends and industrial stability – a
change that is natural and unavoidable."
He further elaborates:
In the years of sovereign debt crisis, these white
elephants of peer pressured national pride, much like the factory shells
in defunct industrial cities, are testament to humans continued failure
to comprehend inevitable entropic social change. We need to consider
the possibility that all human construction in the future could have the
technology of functional adaptation.
The work hopes to achieve an appreciation of aesthetic
architectural qualities, in cohesion with their contextual relationship
to the societies they were constructed for and by. In the cases of
abandonment the effect of their power, achievement and status on human
landscape, equally exaggerates their failure, in the context of their
functional disestablishment.
With Boris Johnson at the self-appointed helm of the London Legacy
Development Corporation, permanent tenants secured for seven of the
eight Olympic venues and a promise “to promote and deliver physical,
social, economic and environmental regeneration in the Olympic Park and
surrounding area”, legacy planning is undoubtedly an issue that London
2012 has enthusiastically addressed.
With Boris Johnson at the self-appointed helm of the
London Legacy Development Corporation,
permanent tenants secured for seven of the eight Olympic venues and a
promise “to promote and deliver physical, social, economic and
environmental regeneration in the Olympic Park and surrounding area”,
legacy planning is undoubtedly an issue that London 2012 has
enthusiastically addressed.
And yet these portraits – stark, unyielding, silent - are a curious
reminder of an evolution that is often beyond our control. We can build
it, but can we master it? We’ll wait and see.
Borrow, Build, Abandon: Athenian Adventures in Concrete Steel is Jamie McGregor Smith's first solo show; now on at the Print House Gallery, 18 Ashwin Street, London E8 until 3rd October.
This article originally appeared on the New Statesman.
