The Metropolis

Interviewed: Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kötting on their Olympic pedalo film Swandown

Mike Pollitt | Friday 20 July, 2012 11:11

Swandown’s plot is simple. Two men pluck a swan-shaped pedalo from a pond in Hastings, where its kind are rented out to tourists. They pedal it from Hastings to Hackney, to the fences of the Olympic Park.

Why?

Director Andrew Kötting and his co-star Iain Sinclair explain themselves below. In the process they discuss swan sex, the Olympics, and Mayor Johnson’s plan for an estuary airport.

The whole interview carries a swan-sized SPOILER ALERT.

Snipe: How do you explain this swan pedalo journey?

Iain Sinclair: [It came from] Andrew’s practice of deepwater swimming, my practice of urban wandering in edgelands, and how these two worlds coincide…we fixated on the idea of taking the swan and doing this trip…The amazing thing was that it became a film. It would have been a project anyway because it’s something we both really wanted to do.

Snipe: The swan is central to it…

Iain Sinclair: The swan is central. It’s a perfect symbol and it was also a very absurd reality.

Andrew Kötting: It was through happenstance that it was a swan. If it had been a badger on swan lake in Hastings I don’t think the two of us would have been quite so keen. And it’s also ridiculous. Edith [the name they gave their craft] has taken on a life of her own.

Iain Sinclair: The swan might now have a home in Hackney…someone wants her on the Mill Pool at Three Mills Island.

Snipe: She’s become a star.

Andrew Kötting: She’s a star.

A short digression on the sexual habits of swans

Snipe: I saw swans mating recently on Regent’s canal, have you ever seen that?

Andrew Kötting: We have indeed.

Iain Sinclair: Have we?

Andrew Kötting: We have.

Snipe: It’s a very violent act.

Iain Sinclair: They are violent animals. They attacked our smaller swan decoy [a miniature swan pedalo, Edith’s familar, which they called Sitwell]

Andrew Kötting: On one of our walks. They took its head off.

Snipe: Swan on swan?

Andrew Kötting: Swan on swan action.

Iain Sinclair: They would puff themselves up enormously. One of my favourite moments [in the film] is the dead swan. There’s an elderly woman in cycling gear standing beside the river and this dead swan lying beside her and she doesn’t even notice it.

After pedalling along the coast from Hastings to Rye, and upcountry through the inland waterways of Kent, the pair sight London. As their craft approaches the edge of the city, Sinclair abruptly abandons swan, and takes off to catch a plane. He is not seen again.

Iain Sinclair: Ironically sInce the city’s been so much a territory I’ve [dealt] with for years, at the point we arrive I have to leave. Andrew becomes the voice of the city and he goes through territory I see every single day of my life.

Andrew Kötting: Not to have him there [at the end]…there was this sense of yearning. Loneliness.

Snipe: It’s a sad ending.

Andrew Kötting: Sorrowful. Melancholic.

Canals, Change, Drift, Memory.

Iain Sinclair: [Swandown] also links with a film which has just been released by the BFI called Wonderful London which is a documentation of a journey through Limehouse basin in the 1920s – they relate so beautifully. From the working canal to this other space as it is now.

Snipe: The swan pedalo is a symbol that the canal has become a leisure space…the industry is not there…

Andrew Kötting: They’ve removed so many of the inhabitants, the indigenos…[the film’s] about drift…

Iain Sinclair: …and memory.

Andrew Kötting: It’s not meant to be prosiac, it’s not meant to be a lecture, it’s not an essay in anything…it’s an impression. You have to be in the landscape to experience this.

The Olympics

Snipe: It’s not a prosaic film but issues intrude, the Olympics is one.

Iain Sinclair: A big issue for me. Part of my wanting to do it, my insistence that it was done before the Olympics…I saw it as a counter act to the huge overweaning invasion of the territory.

Snipe: In the film you use the word enclosure.

Iain Sinclair: The enclosure of territory that meant so much to me…where I’d worked when I started out doing labouring jobs, where I’d roamed…through this edgeland which was a mixture of grunge pastoral and recovering industrial…that was enclosed and gone, and bringing a swan there for me was an act of transformation…to redeem this landscape from the invasion. I had this vision of lots of swans appearing, other people were going to get swans, and and the whole brown poisoned river being covered with white swans drifiting in…

The estuary airport

Snipe: We’ve been covering the idea of the Estuary airport recently…

Iain Sinclair: Yes I’m horrified by that.

Snipe: There’s a moment when you’re in the estuary, at the Isle of Grain…

Iain Sinclair: Yes, that feels like the last free space, the last wilderness, because this other area has been eaten away…there’s nothing left but the Isle of Grain and the Isle of Sheppey. If you whack an airport in there…

Andrew Kötting: It could work perfectly because the London Stone could demarcate where the arrival terminal is. In 20 years time that will be an atrium, and plastic trees.

Iain Sinclair: In Ghost Milk, which I wrote with the Olympics hanging over me, one of the big things I wanted to do was to get to the London Stone because it’s the marker where the tidal Thames starts. But you can’t get to it by land because it’s all on military land. I spent four days trying to get in and I finally did it on a kayak, so going there again on the pedalo was like a salute to beating the enclosure.

Isn’t it all just a pale remake of Dumb and Dumber?

Andrew Kötting: Iain read from his book Down River as we passed the London Stone…it was elegiac…but occasionally the wordsmithery would get a little bit too much so I would just climb overboard.

Snipe: Swandown also works as a buddy road trip movie.

Iain Sinclair: [laughing] Apparently so.

Andrew Kötting: A gay love story.

Iain Sinclair: The feet washing scene is very funny. It does have a false and real sense of being moving at the end because I’ve gone, and I took the story away with me.

Snipe: That felt like a classic plot point – the breaking up – and you were going to come back and you never did. It reminded me…I don’t know if either of you have seen the film Dumb and Dumber with Jim Carrey, they travel across America in a dog-shaped van…

Andrew Kötting: And you were reminded of that?

Snipe: I couldn’t stop thinking…

Iain Sinclair: Well that was the other title we could have chosen.

Andrew Kötting: Clever and Dumber.

But which one’s the swan?

Swandown is on show at the following cinemas:

ICA, 20-22 July
Curzon Soho, 20-26 July
hmvcurzon Wimbledon, 28-29 July
The Aubin Shoreditch, 5 August

There’s also an installation at Dilston Grove, Bermondsey, until 29 July.

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