Sophie Mellor

Text by Emma Cocker

Images by Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter

Published by Close and Remote 2011

ISBN 978-0-9568405-0-9

Manual for Marginal Places is a textbook for exploring the peripheral, acknowledging marginal acts as well as marginal places. There are no definitive ways of determining what is marginal. Marginal places come about through human agency, industrial decline or geographic remoteness. Marginal acts call for a type of tactical honesty – an acknowledgment of the median and an adroit détournement from the obvious and the everyday.

Throughout the Manual there is a series of images from Taos, New Mexico; Vernon City, Los Angeles; and Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. The images allude to marginal acts by both people and nature. There is the skilful honesty of the Taos mesa residents. Operating on the outskirts of society, away from the prying eyes of the state, they utilise the waste of others; the abundance of nature; as well as their own ingenuity, to build their homes. There is the opportunistic honesty of nature re-colonising the industrial spaces of Vernon City. Bougainvillea draping itself over rusty machinery; wading birds traversing the cement encased Los Angeles River; feral cats finding their home in railway sidings. Behaviour borne of a strong sense of place and recognition of the possibility of the particular.

The northern English town of Barrow-in-Furness is an example of marginality through location and economics. Lying at the tip of the Furness peninsula, it is an industrial town that has gone through a series of transformations. In an effort to rapidly expand accommodation for its growing workforce, Barrow became one of the first ‘planned towns’ in the UK. Following the end of the Second World War, Barrow’s heavy industries went into steady decline. This growth and decline has inevitably created a landscape of post-industrial wastelands, punctuated by nature.

‘Regeneration’ has followed, by necessity to give new life to cities and towns that have seen such decline. A conflict arises between history and heritage, the temptation being to parcel up the past for future generations in an anodyne form. A deeper immersion in location might require a more specific set of skills founded on chance, random-encounter and sense.

Emma Cocker’s text ‘Making Room for Manoeuvre; or, Ways of Operating along the Margins’ provides a lyrical discourse on modes and methodologies of sensing and encountering the marginal. These short pieces of writing, advocate a techné, or human skill, based on openness to the moment. Working from perceptions and experiences of the marginal, particularly in Barrow-in-Furness, she encourages the user to dispense with touristic convention and instead turn to brinkmanship. Her texts are co-located alongside Sophie Mellor’s hand written correspondence from a week long experience of wandering the environs of Barrow-on-Furness. These notes detail her attempts to find food and shelter while relying on the kindness of strangers. Placed together within this manual they act as both suggestion and experience of self-reliance in a marginal place.

To be useful, a manual often needs to give the user an overview of how a thing works and then more detailed information on its application and maintenance. In this case the manual format is extracted from the mechanical and re-directed towards the desire or yearning for authentic experience. Unlike the well-known Haynes automotive manuals, this book does not offer a complete strip down and rebuild of a location; it makes suggestions in the direction of raw experience. Away from how things work and toward how you might work.

Close and Remote, April 2011
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