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Passionately committed to black struggle, Keith Piper considers his work as part of the larger project of social and cultural transformation. Political awareness, the history of the African diaspora and issues surrounding gender have come to be central to the on-going project of 'Black Art' in Great Britain.>
Keith Piper believes that in contemporary multi-cultural societies it is possible to 'cut and mix' elements from a broad range of cultures. His notion is that there must be a shift towards a more international point of view, away from the centrality of European standard.
'The Exploded City' plays upon notions of the lines of demarcation, which currently transact urban spaces, creating barriers and frontiers between people on the basis of racial and class difference.
In the work a central figure recites a text based around the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. In the background there are scenes of urban landscapes and clips of news footage. Fragments of sounds depicting urban unrest are mixed through the videos. The underlying concept of the piece is described in the biblical text:
“Behold, the people are one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do, Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, they may not understand one anothers speech”.
(Genesis 11 verse 6-7)
The 'exploded' city exists in the space after the fragmentation of language and in which economic, social, cultural and racial differences are entrenched through the cultivation of so-called 'no go areas'. Against this background individuals charge themselves with new defensive attitudes. Eye contact is scrupulously avoided. The antithesis of this dislocated city is the 'integrated' city where modernist architects, utopian town planners and political propagandists sought to re-impose their ideal of a universally binding plan. For Keith Piper the dislocated city is closer to reality whereas the integrated is mere a vision.
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Interview with Keith Piper