GHOSTLY FOOTSTEPS:

VOICES, MEMORIES AND WALKS

IN THE CITY
David Pinder

This paper is concerned with urban walking and the work of contemporary artists and
writers who take to the streets in order to explore, excavate and map hidden spaces and
paths in the city. The focus is on an audio-walk by the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff entitled
The missing voice (case study B), which is set in east London. Connections are also drawn with
other recent projects in the same area by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair. The paper
discusses how these artists raise important issues about the cultural geographies of the city
relating to subjectivity, representation and memory. Cardiffs audio-walk in particular works
with connections between the self and the city, between the conscious and unconscious, and
between multiple selves and urban footsteps. In so doing, she directs attention to the sig-
nificance of dreams and ghostly matters for thinking about the real and imagined spaces of
the city.

Breton: For myself, I admit such steps are everything. Where do they lead, that is the
real question. . . . Nadja: Lost steps? But theres no such thing!1

Y ou stand at the crime fiction section of the public library. A woman is with
you, her voice soft and intent. I want you to walk with me, there are some things
I need to show you. At her beckoning you pass the librarians at the main desk,
through the turnstile, and up the stairway to the art and music library. There
you wait at a table while she searches for a book to show you, one with a pho-
tograph of the room the way it used to be when old museum cases lined the
walls. It is unavailable so she directs you instead towards a volume on the table
about Ren Magritte that features the painting The menaced assassin. Someone
has apparently left a note between the pages: Someones following you. The tone
changes. Theres less time than I thought. You follow her directions back down the
stairs, more urgent this time, turning out of the library and into the noise of
Londons Whitechapel High Street. Try to follow the sound of my footsteps, she says,
so that we can stay together.

Ecumene 2001 8 (1) 0967-4608(01)EU205OA 2001 Arnold

2 David Pinder

Figure 1 ~ Whitechapel Public Library, east London: the starting point of Janet Cardiffs
audio-walk The missing voice (case study B). Photo courtesy of Artangel.

The voice is that of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff. It reaches you through head-
phones from a CD of her audio walk The missing voice (case study B).2 From its
starting-point at Whitechapel Library it remains your guide for the next 40 min-
utes as you trace paths through east London. The steps that make up this soli-
tary walking tour are simultaneously real and imagined. The voice locates you
within a fictionalized realm with characters and routes that are articulated
through the spaces of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, with stories that intersect
with other stories, and that take form through your own experiences, thoughts
and memories as you wander the streets. The artwork literally takes place in the
streets, finding its meaning through its embodied enaction. In effect it is per-
formed or co-created by participants. It is the very condition of the city to be
plural with a multiplicity of stories, an inexhaustability of narratives, peopled
with strangers and difference. Here the stories are elusive and fragmentary;
thoughts and perceptions shift, threads and clues are hinted at, dropped, cir-
cled round and pursued. Your senses are heightened. The atmosphere remains
taut and compelling as the walk unfolds with much that is reminiscent of detec-
tive fiction and film noir. There is indeed a sense of participating in a book or
a film as you are caught up in the narrative, both aware of its fabrication (with

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

 Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories and walks in the city 3
its directions, intercutting voices and bursts of music) and at the same time
immersed within the space-between it creates (between fiction and reality as the
sounds merge with those around you, and you are on this pavement with these
buildings, these people and these passers-by).
In this essay I want to consider how The missing voice explores and maps out
routes through the city. I also want to show how it connects with concerns that
are more generally animating a number of artists and writers as well as acade-
mics interested in the cultural geographies of cities. I will suggest that, along
with other recent projects, it opens up space for reflecting on important issues
relating to urban walking and subjectivity, representation, memory and an urban
unconscious. The missing voice is the first work in Britain by Janet Cardiff, who
currently lives in Lethbridge, Alberta. It is also her longest and most ambitious
audio-walk to date. When it opened in June 1999 it was initially scheduled for
five months but its success and popularity led to it being extended until the end
of 2000 and now beyond. It followed earlier audio-walks that since 1991 have
been set in a variety of locations in countries including Brazil, Canada, Denmark,
Germany and the United States. All have involved stories with participants
sharing the thoughts of a narrator via the medium of a Walkman or Discman.
They are difficult to place according to traditional artistic categories, for as one
critic puts it: In Cardiffs work, the movie is no longer on the screen, the art
is no longer in the museum; its in the forest and on the street, its in our heads.
3
Her previous works include installations using sound within galleries, often
in ways that depend upon audience movement and touch to evoke imagined
stories and spaces.4

Figure 2 ~ Im standing in the library with you. You can hear the turning of newspaper pages,
people talking softly. From Cardiff, The missing voice. Photo by Stephen White, courtesy of
Artangel.

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

4 David Pinder

Figure 3 ~ Janet Cardiff, creator of The missing voice. Photo by Stephen White, courtesy
of Artangel.

The missing voice was commissioned by Artangel, an independent organization

based in London that has been collaborating with artists since the early 1990s
to take contemporary art into new contexts. Cardiffs interests chime closely with
Artangels concern with the relationship between artist and place, and between
events and audiences, and her piece follows some remarkable projects in dif-
ferent media commissioned by the organization in London in recent years.
These include the much-discussed cast of a Victorian terrace house in the East
End by Rachel Whiteread in House (1993), installations in the Clink Street Vaults
by Robert Wilson and Hans Peter Kuhn in H.G. (1995), and a meditation on
time and memory by John Berger and Simon McBurney that started in the dis-
used underground station at Aldwych in The vertical line (1999). Other projects
have explored issues of sound and space directly, with live sound-mixes made
from images, noises and snippets of conversation recorded on a tourist trail
between Big Ben and St Pauls Cathedral and played on a double-decker bus
following a similar route by Scanner in Surface noise (1998), and voices relating
strange sightings and paranormal visions relayed in a disused Baptist chapel in
west London by Susan Hiller in Witness (2000).5

Voices and the aural walk

The journey of The missing voice begins with footsteps. As you turn into a nar-
row archway off Whitechapel High Street, the rhythm of walking is accompa-
nied by everyday observations: a plane passing overhead, dogs barking, cold wind
round the neck. Banana peels on the ground. But what was that snatch of film

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

 Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories and walks in the city 5
dialogue? What about this dame whos passing herself off as Carla? And who is the
woman in the picture that the narrator likens herself to, when she states that
she is now wearing a red-haired wig? I found her photograph in the tube station,
beside one of those photo booths. A woman with long red hair staring out at me. I put it
in my pocket, I dont know why. Later another voice, apparently that of a male
detective, reports the sighting by a shopkeeper on Brick Lane of a tall woman
with long red hair and an American accent. The interweaving of recorded
sounds with those of the city make it difficult to locate their sources and to dis-
cern their reality. There are fragments of conversations and the noises of vehi-
cles and wailing sirens. A parade passes through Brick Lane as you walk up it.
A tour guide is overheard describing the history of the Jewish population in the
area. At times there is a naturalistic fade, at others a deliberate cut. An effect
of the soundtrack and especially of hearing the artists first-person observations
and her accompanying footsteps, as well as her instructions to turn this way or
that, to wait here or to cross that road there, is to make you acutely aware of
rhythm, pace, breath: of the practice of walking. It emphasizes the sensuousness
of walking as a mode of apprehending the city that is tactile, aural and olfac-
tory as well as visual. It is an activity that enunciates and gives shape to urban
spaces; one that is not localized but that spatializes.6
While the soundtrack of The missing voice sharpens attention to outward sur-
roundings, it also fosters an inward awareness and an almost detached sense of
the urban scene. Cardiff as the narrator mentions herself that she sometimes
feels invisible during her passage through the streets, as she remains solitary
and largely avoids interaction with the people around her. Her intimate voice
and poetic musings nevertheless create a sense of collaboration, of even being
a co-conspirator. The relationship between what she says and conjures up in the
imagination and your own experiences and perceptions is critical. Like your
respective steps, your observations may slip in and out of time. As narrator, many
of Cardiffs references are to the present to newspaper headlines on news
stands, to building works that may have now moved on and these heighten
the sense of the transience and changing rhythms of urban life. Some of the
most sudden jolts then come from moments of recognition. For instance, on
my walk there is indeed a lime green car parked by the side of Fashion Street
(as I pass, a man in a nearby doorway gives me a knowing nod, seemingly in on
the act); and, just as Cardiff says, there is a man walking towards me along
Bishopsgate in a suit with his collar too tight. This time there is no older man
with a blue jacket tuning his radio on the bench by St Botolphs church, and
instead two teenagers swerve their bikes around where he would be. But the
description of tulips and the smell of flowers here makes me wistful for other
seasons as a winters evening closes in. Familiar spaces are rendered new as other
presences and resonances are called into being.
Cardiffs narratorial voice is not constant. Her measured and close-up first-
person narration that observes and gives directions is interspersed with personal
thoughts and memories. It also sometimes switches to a more distant third per-
son that acts as a voice over. Snippets of her voice are further played back on
a hand-held tape recorder. These differentiated and shifting perspectives

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

6 David Pinder

Figure 4 ~ Have you ever had the urge to disappear, to escape from your own life even for just
a little while? From Cardiff, The missing voice. Photo by Stephen White, courtesy of
Artangel.

become a means of moving between stories and exploring multiple selves that
haunt the streets. Early on the narrator states: I started these recordings as a way
to remember, to make life seem more real. I cant explain it but then the voice became some-
one else, a separate person hovering in front of me like a ghost. The narrators voice is
occasionally intercut with those of an anonymous man and also a male detec-
tive who seems to be on the trail of a woman with red hair, who has apparently
disappeared or perhaps been murdered. His interjections of clues and sightings
entangle the plot. Found in her bag two cassette tapes with a receipt and a tape recorder.
And later: I believe shes still in this area. The last line is followed by the narrators
own confession, accompanied by atmospheric music from a movie connoting
mystery and suspense: I sent him the photograph and the audio tapes. I hired him to
find her. The figure of the detective has long been associated with the complexity
of modern urban life. It rests on the idea of confronting the citys apparent
unknowability in its infinite spread and diversity, and of following clues to tame
and make intelligible its secrets and scrambled paths. It embodies a realist epis-
temological claim about the potential of knowing the city and of mastering a
labyrinthine urban reality.7 At the same time, here and in certain other writings
and films, the detectives presence comes to speak of the difficulties of reading
and knowing the city, where the citys legibility and representability have been
thrown into doubt and become a focus of anxiety, or in more extreme cases
where they have become the subject of paranoiac webs of connection, as in the
self-reflexive, metaphysical detective fiction of Paul Auster.8
Questions about representation are indeed central to The missing voice as the
voices on the soundtrack shift between spaces and locations. The perspective of

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

 Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories and walks in the city 7
the narrator is combined with overviews describing the scene as well as with
thoughts from or about distant places. Some of these perspectives are attained
through electronic surveillance, enabling the adoption of a voyeuristic position
of the kind critiqued by Michel de Certeau, who contrasts it with the lived real-
ity of the city associated with walkers at ground level.9 I watch your movements on
the monitor, a small dot walking through the streets, whispers a mans voice. Later the
narrator thinks of a man sitting on the other side of the world, floating above
the oceans as he watches the earth on his computer screen, turning past dif-
ferent continents by moving his mouse. He believes that he can see her walk-
ing through the city, her image beamed between satellites around the globe.
More generally, there is an awareness in The missing voice of the interconnect-
edness of views and voices, and of how talking about urban experience neces-
sarily involves engaging with a multiplicity of perspectives, precluding any simple
linear narrative as information and memories jostle amid a shifting present.
Cardiff has commented on her method in an interview:
I try to echo the way our brain shifts attention. Like the way you overhear something
that makes you remember something else, or how when youre out walking you invent
scenarios around the things you see. Or the way weve become conduits for all these
media images, which were unable to filter from our memories.10
Iain Chambers has suggested that using a Walkman in the city offers the pos-
sibility of a micro-narrative, a customised story and soundtrack, not merely a
space but a place, a site of dwelling.11 Through the selection and arrangement
of tracks, it allows the potential for imposing a soundscape on the surrounding
aural environment. For a time, and however weakly, the external world can be
shaped through the machines control buttons stop/start, pause, fast forward,
rewind and another sense of space and time can be produced. The missing
voice is different. On pressing play, it is meant to involve an immersion within
a prearranged soundtrack, one that involves the internalization of other voices
into your own consciousness; and one that deliberately both merges and is at
odds with the surrounding environment. Yet this is not to say that other buttons
cannot be pressed once the journey is in progress, nor that Cardiffs narrator-
ial direction of actions is necessarily followed. (There are indeed reports of peo-
ple getting lost on her audio-walks or briefly taking off the headphones to work
out the reality of sounds.12 In my own case, the CD jumped as I stepped into
Whitechapel High Street and I spent a few disorienting minutes adrift in a later
section, before realizing what had happened and having to skip back.) Also, as
with Chamberss account of the aural walk, although more consciously and delib-
erately in this case, the project activates the imagination in the production of a
different sense of space and time. It opens up the prospect of a passage in
which we discover . . . those other cities that exist inside the city.13 This is some-
thing that Cardiffs project shares with other recent commissions by Artangel
that are part of its Inner City series. Begun in 1998, this series aims to make a
part of the city seem temporarily transformed, re-mapped or revealed in some
new way. By bringing together a range of writers and thinkers, it explores the
interface of the city and the word in both its spoken and written forms and
seeks to excavate a range of urban places and contemplate the changing nature

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

8 David Pinder
of city environments and the counterpoint between narrative and place; between
language and location.14

Memory and mapping the city

According to Janet Cardiff, The missing voice was partly a response to her living
for a while in a large city such as London, drifting its streets, listening, watch-
ing and reading, solitary and lost. Having come from a small town, it was, she
says, an experience that enhanced the paranoia that I think is quite common
to a lot of people, especially women, as they adjust to a strange city. The form
of the project is also a testament to her own urge to construct scenarios and
narratives around her everyday encounters, something she associates with a
desire to dramatize my life, make it real by making it filmic or probably the
result of reading too many detective novels or watching too many movies.15 The
recordings were made on location through the use of binaural audio. This
involves the artist walking with a mannequin held out in front of her with micro-
phones in each of its ears, so that the recorded sounds are like those that would
be heard by a pedestrian on the same route. Further layers of voices, sounds
and music are then added, with The missing voice employing up to 32 tracks of
continuous sound in all.
Given Cardiffs acknowledgement of the intertextuality of her piece, it is not
surprising that it brings to mind a number of other novels and films. Names
that have been mentioned as influences include Raymond Chandler and Philip
K. Dick as well as film makers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott and David
Lynch. What concerns me most here, though, are the ways in which her work
connects with a wider current interest in urban walking, in artistic and literary
projects as well as historical and academic studies. What is behind this interest
in the art of taking a walk? From where has this spate of reinvented flneurs and
flneuses come? More particularly, how is this concern with walking connected
with attempts to read, understand and re-map geographies of the city? This last
question has been especially crucial in some of the better-known excursions in
literary and cinematic drifting that have recently taken London as their focus.
Along with the physic landscaping of Patrick Keillors film London (1993), with
its fictitious journeys taken in search of artists and writers from the past, and
with its still camera shots intent on wresting different stories from the built envi-
ronment, there are texts by the likes of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair who
have for longer been reimagining East London through investigative wanders.
Sinclairs urban walks in particular demonstrate a concern not only with explor-
ing ambiences in the city but also with memory, with excavating hidden histo-
ries and geographies, and with rewriting conventional maps to reveal some of
the other cities that exist inside the city.
The missing voice itself opens up the idea of the city through its attention to
historical layers and multiple narratives and identities. Cardiffs references to
the scaffolding and hoardings of construction sites accentuate the feeling of the
impermanence of the landscape as well as being indicative more specifically of
the transformations affecting parts of Spitalfields through gentrification, the

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

 Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories and walks in the city 9
expansion of City of London financial institutions, and flows of people and cap-
ital. Within this changing scene she refers to memories and images from the
past, not only her own childhood memories but also stories about the area from
the perspective of a visitor, gleaned from books. The listener is informed about
how the art and music library used to look, and how Fashion Street appears in
an old photograph as a cobblestoned and foggy lane. There is also the tale of
a man who lived in that street for 20 years and who played the violin in his room
as he waited for the woman he loved to return. What becomes of such passion?
How can we just walk over the footsteps and not remember? These echoes and whis-
pers filter into the present tense, reminders of previous steps that have been
taken this way and of how lives and activities intertwine and part through
these times and spaces.
As the citys fabric changes, so do the spaces through which memories take
form. Passing another building-site, the narrator reflects on the palimpsest-like
qualities of the urban. I wonder if the workers ever think about themselves as the chang-
ers of the city, the men that cover up the old stories, making room for new ones? It is
through walking that connections are made with stories that are interwoven in
the space-times of the city. In Cardiffs earlier piece Walk Mnster (1997), a char-
acter seeks to follow the steps of his lost daughter, apparently as a means of
coming closer to her and somehow bringing her back into his presence. In The
missing voice, without necessarily consciously seeking contact, you are continually
made aware of other steps, paths, presences and often seem to be inhabiting a
realm of ghosts. This feeling of spectral traces comes partly from your relation-
ship with the people in the soundtrack, including the narrator herself, who were
apparently walking this way earlier but who have now moved on or are missing.
The theme of disappearance indeed runs through the piece, with the narrator

Figure 5 ~ Fashion Street in Spitalfields, with the spire of Christ Church above the
rooftops. Photo courtesy of Artangel.

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

10 David Pinder

Figure 6 ~ Were underneath a construction awning, pieces of old wood above us. I wonder
whats behind here? . . . From Cardiff, The missing voice. Photo of Bishopsgate courtesy of
Artangel.

herself reflecting on the urge to disappear. She also recalls the incomprehen-
sion as a child that someone could just vanish as well as the agonies that result.
Ghostly presences are also felt in the way that space and time in the sound-
track shift, making you aware of connections not only with other places but also
other times, as geographies and histories collide. This happens most dramati-
cally when, as you pass down a side street in view of the spire of Christ Church,
built by Hawksmoor in the eighteenth century, a new scene is suddenly described
in front of you. Graffiti, barbed wire, men with guns and uniforms appear, and
there are fires all around. The sound of machine-gun fire breaks out, a heli-
copter beats low overhead. An air raid siren is followed by the wails of emer-
gency services and the noise of a car alarm. The narrator speaks of people having
visions of coffins in the air, and of heaps of dead bodies lying unburied. The
previously calm setting is shattered and a dark pall cast over the area. The dis-
placement may be to a war zone or perhaps the scene of a terrorist attack.16
Later, while standing at Liverpool Street Railway Station, the scene again shifts
unexpectedly and it appears as empty, blackness and rubble everywhere, holes in the
glass roof.

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

 Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories and walks in the city 11
Cardiff uses similarly disturbing and unexplained visions to disrupt scenes in
other audio-walks, with fires a common feature. It is like the eruption of dreams
or unconscious thoughts into consciousness. As in dreams, the fixity of space
and the linearity of time give way. In the gap between the scenes as described
and as experienced, questions arise about the supposed stability of what is seen.
The dreamlike qualities of the work speak generally to a sense of the transi-
toriness of the city and urban experience, where flux and change undermine
the certainties of a stable ground. For Elizabeth Wilson, this is a disquieting but
characteristic aspect of the modern city: one never retraces the same pathway
twice, for the city is in a constant process of change, and thus becomes dream-
like and magical, yet also terrifying in the way a dream can be.17 The shifts in
times and places are also like the recall of memories, triggered by the passage
through space, where the city and its streets are repositories of stories and spec-
tres that may suddenly be actualized in the present. The movement of the body
through the city itself invokes memories, a process associated with what Proust
termed mmoire involontaire. There is a wider argument to be made here about
the active significance of space and streets in remembering and forgetting. As
Steve Pile puts it:
The networks of streets both produce and contain memories. At one and the same
time, one can travel in time and move through space. Each new angle, each new expe-
rience on the streets, could produce another memory in a flash, the past, the pre-
sent and the future are combined and recombined.18
The elusiveness of some of the visions in The missing voice is therefore related to
the suddenness with which they appear, to the unpredictable and instantaneous
flash of the involuntary memory that is prompted by movement through the
street.

Excavating places and pathways

The associations and psychic charge of urban sites is something that a number
of writers and artists have recently addressed. Reflecting on the spatial patterns
of murders in Whitechapel, all of which had been committed in the streets and
alleys around Christ Church, Peter Ackroyds fictional detective Hawksmoor
notes how certain streets or patches of ground provoked a malevolence which
generally seemed to be quite without motive.19 Chris Jenks proposes the term
minatorial geography to discuss such resonances of threat, menace and forms
of exclusion or challenges to access. He considers this especially in relation to
histories of social exploration and walking in Londons East End, and to the
ways in which certain sites are experienced by the flneur in terms of fascina-
tion as well as repulsion or intimidation.20 But for an explicit discussion within
the literary field of the significance of walking for addressing ambiences and
atmospheres in this area, one can turn to Iain Sinclair. His poem Lud heat (1975)
was acknowledged by Ackroyd as an initial inspiration for his own Hawksmoor
(1985). Sinclairs books since then have ventured further into this terrain as he
has positioned himself as a kind of born-again flneur, seeking out the marginal

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

12 David Pinder
and obscure from his base in Hackney. He has also come to adopt the term psy-
chogeography, previously favoured by the situationists with reference to their
own critical urban drifts, although he looks back more to William Blake and
Thomas De Quincey in his poetic and mythological understanding of this activ-
ity than to the politicized practices of that avant-garde group. Walking is the
best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, breaks in the cloud hel-
met, movement of light on water, Sinclair writes. Drifting purposefully is the
recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reveries, allowing the
fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself.21 Elsewhere he contends that
urban walking is a way of contacting the ghosts and levels of a city, the past and
the future.22
Discussing the practice of taking a walk where walking has happened before,
of walking to get in touch with the paths of previous writers and to contact
ghosts, Sinclair describes how layers of the city come to the surface in little
flashes and bites. He argues that walking is the best way to come to terms with
a rambling poem such as Blakes Jerusalem, and he likens this awareness of shad-
owy presences to the passage from T.S. Eliots The wasteland that begins: Who
is the third who walks always beside you?23 Sinclair continues:
Whenever there are two people walking down a road theres always a third present,
and the solitary walker soon gathers with him a commonality of other walkers behind,
all whispering and talking in his ear, and trying to seduce him to turn right into this
mystery or turn left into that building, go up that church tower. Youre aware of them,
and I dont think you can do that any other way than by walking.24
Janet Cardiffs The missing voice is striking in the way it gives form to such whis-
pers and voices. They literally direct the walker to turn up this alley or into that
church. At the same time they question the boundedness and singularity of the
self. Eliots reference to another one walking beside you is echoed in Cardiffs
comment early on in the soundtrack about how, through her tape recordings,
the voice became someone else, a separate person hovering in front of me like a ghost. It
also relates to Cardiffs own account of making the piece when, on listening to
notes she had made on a tape recorder, she realized that this voice became
another woman, a different character from myself, a companion of sorts.25 On
the walk itself, the voices composed by Cardiff are in turn enacted through the
practices of the individual walker and through her or his relationship with the
area with all its criss-crossing stories, layers and identities. The result is a kind
of melding, to use Cardiffs term, and she draws on the language of dreams
to discuss the processes involved:
Just as our dreams sometimes infiltrate our waking reality, I think the walking pieces
break down the barriers of what the listeners think of as their singular self. My sur-
rogate body starts to infiltrate their consciousness while in reverse their remembered
dreams, triggered by phrases and sounds, invade and add to the artwork.26
Among the paths that The missing voice intersected with in Whitechapel when
it opened were those being explored by Sinclair and the artist Rachel
Lichtenstein, in a project based on the life and wanderings of David Rodinsky,
who had lived in an attic room above a synagogue in Princelet Street after emi-

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

 Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories and walks in the city 13
grating from Poland. Their approach was more archaeological than Cardiffs,
more grounded in historical routes and resonances. Lichtensteins grandparents
had migrated from Poland themselves in the 1930s to settle initially in Princelet
Street, and had married at the synagogue. While she sought to learn more about
them and to excavate her family heritage, she became fascinated by the story
of the reclusive Rodinsky, who had mysteriously disappeared in 1969, the year
that she was born, and whose room was discovered, untouched and coated in
dust, more than a decade later. After visiting the synagogue in 1990, Lichtenstein
became artist in residence and spent years on Rodinskys trail, walking the
streets, searching for people who knew him, and investigating and cataloguing
the chaotic collection of materials and scholarly works that he had left in his
room. These included more than 50 cases of books that were found spilled across
almost every surface when the room was opened, alongside writings, records,
coded notebooks, and maps and cabalistic charts. In the midst of the posses-
sions were a congealed cup of tea and unfinished pot of porridge, it is said,
along with a calendar by the mantelpiece with the date at January 1963.
Rodinskys story had further intrigued Sinclair who had been an early visitor
to the room in its original state. After meeting Lichtenstein, Sinclair started to
write about her work on the subject, referring to her as someone who spe-
cialised in not-forgetting and as an archivist of the unconscious.27 Their shared
interests and collaborations resulted in their co-authored book, Rodinskys room,
published in 1999.28 Through her research for the project Lichtenstein had also
started to conduct walking tours of the area, and that same year she published
a guide through the geography of the story as part of Artangels Inner City
series, entitled Rodinskys Whitechapel.29 Lichtensteins walk is based around key
sites in both Rodinskys life and her own past. Her route crosses and overlaps
with the one taken by Cardiffs audio-walk at a number of points, and has the
same starting-place, at Whitechapel Library. It is also similarly haunted by dis-
appearance: in this case not only that of Rodinsky himself but more generally
that of the old Jewish East End of London. Much of the walk involves tracing
elements of buildings, institutions and a community that are now on the verge
of vanishing, with many Jewish people having headed north-westwards in the
city, and with many Jewish businesses closed or priced out by rising rents.30
Sinclair further took up Rodinskys wanderings by focusing on the latters per-
sonal copy of the Geographers A to Z atlas of London and suburbs, which he bor-
rowed from an archival box in his room. Pages of the maps are marked with
scrawls and paths, while cards and wrappers are inserted bearing unexplained
instructions. Bursts of activity appear in red biro around selected sites and loca-
tions, and an underground map is doctored with rail links added. Certain cat-
egories of location receive particular attention, with institutions such as prisons,
asylums, burial grounds and hospitals being especially privileged. Tourist trails
are meanwhile ignored. Poring over this find, Sinclair was gripped. [D]id
Rodinskys markings trace journeys he had already made? he asks. Or were
these annotations, laboured over in his Princelet Street attic, his way of uncov-
ering an occulted pattern? Were those wavering lines, sometimes fierce, some-
times faint, the record of a magical act?31 Faced with the challenge of making

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

14 David Pinder
sense of Rodinskys psychogeographical codes and systems of classification, and
wanting to get closer to what he decided were real excursions through the city,
Sinclair followed his usual tack: he took to the streets, to stalk Rodinskys foot-
steps. He followed the inscriptions on the maps for three journeys, from South
Woodford, Dagenham and Liverpool Street station respectively, approaching the
lines and instructions as if they were part of a film script.
Sinclair suggests in relation to Rodinskys dtournement of maps that he may
be seen as an artist akin to the surrealists, as a re-maker of found objects.
Sinclair writes: He bent his maps to fit his notion of how London should be
if he was describing it for the first time. Maps were prompts rather than defin-
itive statements.32 But questions about Rodinskys system multiply. What guides
the inscriptions, the rings of red ink, the chosen paths? To what do the instruc-
tions on scraps of card and other inserts refer? Variously accompanied on walks
by Marc Atkins and Chris Petit, and working with the directions indicated by
Rodinsky as well as attending to coincidences and the contours of the terrain,
Sinclair found the patterns turning into narratives, and each of the paths becom-
ing like chapters in an unfinished and unwritten autobiography. The routes
around South Woodford led towards a former mental hospital that had once
housed Rodinskys sister. What had apparently been opaque paths in Dagenham
now seemed to mark other episodes from his childhood, from when he had
been sent to the area from Spitalfields to stay with foster parents. Recording the
walks on film, Sinclair and his fellow walkers relayed the results during June
1999 on monitors at selected locations in Whitechapel, from the basement of a
bookshop to a hotel bedroom. They thus returned shadows of Rodinskys steps
to the area in which he had lived, allowing the spatial stories to connect with
those of other people passing through streets now greatly changed since
Rodinskys time, simultaneously adding layers and connections of their own.33

Connecting threads
Turning back to Janet Cardiffs The missing voice, where do its footsteps lead?
What happens to its narrative threads? What does their resolution or lack of it
say about the works engagement with the city? Towards the middle of the walk
the male detective states with reference to the woman he is tracking: As far as
I can tell shes mapping different paths through the city. I cant seem to find a reason for
the things she notices and records. The components of the mysterious plot help to
create an atmosphere of foreboding. The clues remain elusive and feature frag-
mentary reports: a bag found containing cassette tapes and a tape recorder; the
identification of a womans body; a picture from a newspaper of the woman with
long red hair; a package sent to the unidentified man. Her letter made no sense to
me, something about seeing a newspaper picture. Theyre similarities but theyre obviously
not the same person. It is a common enough strategy in modern fiction to stress
the opacity of the city, the difficulties of reading and piecing together its frag-
mented elements. The detectives inability to make sense of the events in The
missing voice brings to mind the struggles and failures to map the city by
detective figures in other texts. A striking case is Paul Austers The New York tril-

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

 Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories and walks in the city 15
ogy, especially the attempts by the character Quinn in the first section of that
book, City of Glass, to plot the steps of the older Peter Stillman. Quinn, a
reader and writer of mystery novels and an inveterate walker in the city himself,
follows Stillman closely through the streets of Manhattan, noting his actions and
movements. He is puzzled by what seem to be aimless wanderings, unable to
explain Stillmans motives as he searches the ground and picks up objects, bits
of junk, some of which he discards, others which he keeps. Despite accumulat-
ing evidence and apparent insights there is in fact no final detection, no moment
of revelation that sets the proceeding events in order. There is no figure that
succeeds in the detectives role, defined early on in the book as the one who
looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search
of the thought, the idea that will put all these things together and make sense
of them.34 Instead, truths and meanings are cast in doubt as the narrative lay-
ers proliferate, spiral in on themselves and elude interpretation.
It is worth remembering, as Christopher Prendergast points out, that while
such a stress on the opacity of the city relinquishes fantasies of omnipotence or
mastery that are shot through with ideological and political dangers, a move
towards the idea of obscurity or illegibility itself carries risks. These relate to the
ways in which such obscurity may be not only a characteristic of the qualities of
lived experience but also the effect of the operation of powerful interests;
indeed, it is likely to be highly comforting for those who benefit from the
unequal distribution of power in the city and from the masking of their inter-
ests and actions. Included here are real estate developers and those that profit
from heritage projects that recuperate and commodify local histories, among
them perhaps the kinds of story being recovered through art projects such as
those discussed here.35 Cardiffs audio-walk is not constructed around an
impending dnouement, though, and its mystery elements are integrated into
the flow of the walk with its dream passages, fantasies, memories and everyday
observations. More important than the ostensible plot is the way it raises criti-
cal questions about reading and representing urban ambiences, about the inter-
weaving of memories and urban space, and about the construction of senses of
self though urban space-times. The melding between the artwork and the con-
sciousness of the participant mean that the walk is a highly specific experience.
It is different according to mood, circumstances, events as well as the identity
of the individual walker. It will clearly not be experienced by people in the same
way. The gender implications of the noir-style plot and the fears and visions that
it addresses, which are sometimes violent and disturbing, are obviously not inno-
cent or neutral in this regard. The narrator herself comments directly on her
particular fears about walking alone and her coping strategies to make her feel
safer in the streets.
The walk closes at an entrance of Liverpool Street station, overlooking the
crowds. The narrator reflects on the innumerable unknown lives, heading in
different directions. Attention turns to the flows bringing people together and
forging connections; to departures and faces fading in the distance. One story
overlapping with another. This is the nature of London, writes Sinclair, fresh from
tracing Rodinskys footsteps: Endlessly intersecting narratives. Tale-tellers inter-

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

16 David Pinder

Figure 7 ~ I like watching the people from here, all these lives heading in different directions. From
Cardiff, The missing voice. Photo of Liverpool Street station by Stephen White, courtesy
of Artangel.

rupting tale-tellers. Lives that fade into other lives.36 When Cardiffs audio-walk
comes to an end, it is like awakening from a dream. All around are the struc-
tures of corporate and financial power in the City of London and its Broadgate
development. Yet, while still in their shadows, thoughts turn to other map-mak-
ers and tale-tellers with their own stories to relate, with their own narratives and
interventions that insinuate different meanings into, or directly contest, domi-
nant scriptings of urban space. Unlike overtly political and interventionist ver-
sions of psychogeography and the urban walk, The missing voice is individual,
solitary and detached from many aspects of the social geographies through
which it passes. Its dreamlike qualities remain, for me, its most resonant feature.
It centres not so much on a moment of awakening as on the drift of the dream-
walk itself and on exploring the connections between self and city, between the
conscious and unconscious, and between multiple selves and steps through the
streets. Who am I? asked Andr Breton at the opening of his book Nadja. If
this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount
to knowing whom I haunt.37 But as Bretons writings themselves suggest,
addressing how subjectivities and urban spaces intersect, and attending to
dreams and the ghostly matters of the urban, can be a vital means of thinking
about the possibilities of other cities that exist inside the city.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Catherine Nash for her encouragement with this essay,
and Steve Pile and Philip Crang for their helpful comments. I am also grateful
to Artangel for permission to reproduce the photographs. The missing voice (case

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

 Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories and walks in the city 17
study B) continues at Whitechapel Library, London, E1; details are available from
the Artangel information line on +44 (0)20 7713 1402.

Notes
1
Quotations from Andr Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York, Grove
Weidenfeld, 1960), pp. 69, 72 (emphasis original). The book was originally published
in France in 1928.
2
The lines in italics above and subsequently are taken from Janet Cardiffs The missing
voice (case study B). This has also been released as a compact disc with accompanying
photographs, video images and texts under the same title (London, Artangel, 1999).
3
Carol Peaker, The voice of a friend, Weekend post arts (3 July 1999), p. 7.
4
Some of Cardiffs projects are jointly credited to her collaborator and partner, George
Bures Miller. For a discussion of her earlier installations and audio walks, see Kitty
Scott, I want you to walk with me, in Cardiff, The missing voice, pp. 4-16.
5
Many of these events have been followed by afterlives in the form of videos, CDs or
books. Artangels projects have also included original film, television and radio works;
for further information, see the organizations website at www.artangel.org.uk
6
The distinction is from Michel de Certeaus influential essay Walking in the city, in
his The practice of everyday life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1984), pp. 91114 (p. 97). The book was originally published in France in 1974.
7
Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the nineteenth century (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), p.
2. See also Ralph Willett, The naked city: urban crime fiction in the USA (Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 1996); and Philip Howell, Crime and the city solution:
crime fiction, urban knowledge, and radical geography, Antipode 30 (1998), pp.
35778, who discusses the significance of geographical description in these episte-
mological claims.
8
See Steven Marcus, Reading the illegible: some modern representations of urban
experience, in William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, eds, Visions of the modern city:
essays in history, art and literature (New York, Columbia University, 1983), pp. 228-43;
and Jonathan Crary, J.G. Ballard and the promiscuity of forms, Zone 1/2 (1986).
9
De Certeau, Walking in the city, p. 93.
10
Janet Cardiff, cited in Ralph Rugoff, A walk on the wild side, Financial times (1920
June 1999), p. vi.
11
Iain Chambers, The aural walk, in his Migrancy, culture, identity (London, Routledge,
1994), pp. 49-53 (p. 52).
12
Scott, I want you to walk with me, p. 17, nn. 8, 9.
13
Chambers, The aural walk, p. 50.
14
From Artangels Inner City website at www.innercity.demon.co.uk
15
Cardiff, untitled text dated Sept. 1999, in The missing voice, p. 66.
16
Cardiff deliberately leaves the scene open to different interpretations, as the mix of
sounds suggests. The imagery is nevertheless especially disturbing in the wake of the
racist nail-bombing that took place nearby in Brick Lane in April 1999, injuring 13
people. Cardiff remarks on how she passed the bomb in Brick Lane herself just five
minutes before it went off, while she was visiting the area and researching the art pro-
ject. But she stresses the multiple allusions of the sounds and states: People respond
by projecting whatever images and stories come to mind; cited in Rugoff, A walk on
the wild side, p. vi. The vision of coffins and dead bodies may refer to air raids dur-
ing the Second World War, and to memories of the aftermath of a bomb that landed
on a nearby Jewish burial ground. Among other resonances surrounding Christ

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

18 David Pinder
Church are its earlier connection with the plague. When the crypt was excavated in
19849, it was found to be full of lead-lined coffins from that period.
17
Elizabeth Wilson, The sphinx in the city: urban life, the control of disorder, and women
(London, Virago, 1991), p. 3.
18
Steve Pile, Memory and the city, in Jan Campbell and Janet Harbord, eds,
Temporalities, autobiography in a postmodern age (Manchester, Manchester University
Press, forthcoming). Thanks to Steve Pile for allowing me to see this chapter, which
connects with my themes closely here in its discussion of memory and the city, with
particular reference to the writings of Walter Benjamin and to Iain Sinclairs book
Lights out for the territory (London, Granta, 1997).
19
Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (London, Abacus, 1985), p. 116.
20
Chris Jenks, Watching your step: the history and practice of the flneur, in Chris
Jenks, ed., Visual culture (London, Routledge, 1995), pp. 14260.
21
Sinclair, Lights out for the territory, p. 4.
22
Iain Sinclair, interview with Patrick Wright in Walk, BBC Radio 3, 5 Jan. 1996.
23
The passage reads: Who is the third who walks always beside you?/When I count,
there are only you and I together/But when I look ahead up the white road/There
is always another one walking beside you/Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded/I
do not know whether a man or a woman/ But who is that on the other side of
you? T.S. Eliot, The wasteland (1922), repr. in Collected poems 19091962 (London,
Faber & Faber, 1974), p. 77.
24
Sinclair, interview with Wright, in Walk.
25
Cardiff, untitled text dated Sept. 1999, in The missing voice, p. 66.
26
Cardiff, interview with Kitty Scott, 17 Aug. 1999, in Scott, I want you to walk with
me, p. 15. For a more general discussion of dreams and cities, see Steve Pile,
Sleepwalking the modern city: Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud in the world of
dreams, in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, eds, A companion to the city (Oxford,
Blackwell, 2000).
27
Sinclair, Lights out for the territory, p. 238. Sinclair earlier addressed the subject of
Rodinskys room in his Downriver (London, Vintage, 1995; originally published in
1991), pp. 13450. Patrick Wright was influential in bringing Rodinskys story to the
attention of Sinclair, and also in giving it wider public prominence through an essay
that placed it within the context of changes in Spitalfields in the 1980s. Wright espe-
cially highlighted the connection between the fable of the room and gentrifying inter-
ests that were reimagining the area and seeking to define its special heritage. He
argued: Caught in a time warp of the kind that property developers are quick to
straighten out, [Rodinskys room] has become the new Spitalfields version of the
Marie-Celeste. . . . The story of Rodinskys disappearence has become a post-hoc fable of
the gentrifying immigrant quarter: A journey through ruins: the last days of London
(London, Radius, 1991), pp. 99100; an earlier version of the essay appeared as
Rodinskys place, London review of books (24 Oct. 1987).
28
Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, Rodinskys room (London, Granta, 1999).
29
Rachel Lichtenstein, Rodinskys Whitechapel (London, Artangel, 1999).
30
It is a walk you could only do now because it is very much the end of a whole era
here. The story of Jewish immigration has vanished . . .: Iain Sinclair, speaking on an
historical walking tour with Rachel Lichtenstein, 28 June 1999, cited in Colin Brush
and Stephen Waters, Whitechapel, Jewish tracings, Territories 1 (1999), pp. 249 (p.
25).
31
Iain Sinclair, Dark lanthorns: Rodinskys A to Z (Rutland, Goldmark, 1999), p. 12.
32
Ibid., p. 10 (emphasis original).

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)

 Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories and walks in the city 19
33
Lichtenstein meanwhile sought to provide something of a full stop to their project as
well as finally to lay Rodinsky to rest. She chose to end her guided tour at Elfes Ltd,
a stonemasons in Osborne Street, which was commissioned to make a proper memo-
rial stone for Rodinsky. Later in the summer a consecration service was held at
Waltham Abbey cemetery, when the new headstone was set at Rodinskys burial place.
See her Afterword, in the paperback edition of Rodinskys room (London, Granta,
2000), pp. 31739.
34
Paul Auster, The New York trilogy (London, Faber & Faber, 1987), p. 8.
35
Prendergast, Paris and the nineteenth century, pp. 21314.
36
Sinclair, Dark lanthorns, p. 44.
37
Breton, Nadja, p. 11.

Ecumene 2001 8 (1)