Layla Curtis
Traceurs: to trace, to draw, to go fast

CHELSEA Futurespace, in association with Westminster City Council, Futurecity, and the London Festival of Architecture are delighted to present Traceurs a project by Layla Curtis.

Using heat-seeking cameras, Curtis has filmed 'traceurs' (practitioners of Parkour urban jumping), recording their unorthodox movements and alternative routes through the city landscape. Made popular through advertisements and action movies, Parkour is an urban acrobatic activity dedicated to moving from one place to another as efficiently and quickly as possible, using principally the abilities of the human body. Originating in the Banlieue - poor suburbs of Paris - and used in part to escape from authority figures, Parkour is about overcoming any obstacles including railings, ramps, trees, and concrete walls.

Parkour is essentially a 'street' movement and like grafitti artists the highly disciplined and skilled traceurs move mostly undetected through the urban environment. Like skateboarders, traceurs confront the urban fabric and through their practice are some of our most acute architectural critics. Unlike grafitti, however, Parkour leaves no mark. Layla Curtis wanted to trace the untraceable and record the tracks and routes left by traceurs through a variety of locations in the City of Westminster, investigating and documenting 'alternative' routes and passages, and new ways of moving through the city. In response to the almost impossible challenge of recording this virtually invisible activity, Curtis investigated the potential of thermal imaging to record the heat traces of footprints, handprints and other marks left on obstacles and buildings.

The resulting series of films is beautiful and grainy, a kind of temporal drawing in black and white, contrasting with the more familiar highly coloured palette of thermal imaging. The viewer is invited to watch greyish images of walls, trees, and roofs that are almost still until a shock of white fills the screen for an instant as the traceurs leap between obstacles. After this bright flash we notice subtle changes to the grey backgrounds - small white marks where the heat of contact between the body and the environment remain. These heat marks fade away at different speeds depending on the surface (a tree, for example, holds the warm scuff of a handprint for longer than a brick wall) but gradually all traces fade away and we are left once again with the grainy blank façade of the city.

Layla Curtis's thermal films of Parkour - the flourish of human activity and the resulting trace, have their art historical precedents in Hans Namuth's films of Jackson Pollock making an 'action' painting, or Yves Klein's 'Anthropometry' series where the artist directed naked models to cover themselves in paint and drag each other across paper. The fading away of Curtis’s Parkour handmarks, scuffs, and footprints also reminds us of 'Entropy' or the transformation and degeneration of materials, such as the eroded land art of Robert Smithson or a canvas painted with acid in the 'auto-destructive art' of Gustav Metzger.

Parkour and Layla Curtis's attempts to film such transient events are, to quote Yves Klein, - A Leap into the Void.

A screening of Julie Angel's documentary Traceurs, about this project, followed by an informal discussion with Layla Curtis will take place at the ICA, Nash House, The Mall, London SW1 on Saturday 21st and Thursday 26th June 2 - 3.30pm

CHELSEA FUTURESPACE

Hepworth Court, Grosvenor Waterside
Gatliff Road London SW1W 8QP

Open seven days a week 11.00am - 6.00pm

Telephone 020 7514 6000 ext 3710

Director of Exhibitions: Donald Smith

Thermal imaging camera kindly sponsored by FLIR systems