“You can do what you want from the pavement”
In seeking asylum, or attempting to, people are scrutinised while being held in limbo, their lives surveilled and forced into stasis, sometimes for years, as they wait for their fate to be decided. Lunar House is a building of the UK Border Agency (UKBA) where people are required to apply for asylum, report weekly or fortnightly while they wait for a decision, and undergo interrogations and generally hostile dissections of their lives.
The video quite literally looks back at this site of surveillance and violence, engaging in sousveillance [watching from below] to turn a watchful eye back on those normally doing the surveilling. Consisting mainly of one image, Lunar House being appraised by the camera, the video is broken though by pictures of V who continues to experience feelings of limbo in this enforced waiting,
uncertainty in her status and in her feelings of being here, away from
home.
The title comes from what I was told by one of the (three) security guards who came out while I was taking photos.
NB: video contains flashing images.