Edward Crooks

A new public monument for Veszprém, Hungary as part of the outdoor exhibition Face, Pool, Two Towers and a Ruin, showing alongside installations by MAIO, Point Supreme and Supervoid and Paradigma Ariadne. 

All photography by Balazs Danyi.

In the town where I lived the first eighteen years of my life there was a small spire that sat incongruously in the main park, stranded amongst beds of roses. The spire served no direct function, having no clock, no bell, no seating and no weather vane. Yet for almost three decades it has sat at the heart of my memory of this community, the backdrop of successive significant events.

As a child it served as a vessel for my curiosity, confused at the presence of this pointless folly in park of playthings. As a teenager it was the locus for those memories of causing mischief, learning to like beer and daring to steal kisses. As an adult it was at this monument that we gathered to raise a toast to my mother's 60th birthday.

This spire was in fact a fragment of a much larger building - a bell tower, amputated from the roof of a large factory building in the middle of the town. Whilst its bell has not rung for decades, its presence alone has been enough to provide a focal point for the everyday activities that form communities.

I like to imagine this factory building buried deep beneath the park, only the small spire protruding, concealing all that is attached to it, hiding the bigger picture beneath. Just as, being an urban fragment, this small object has, over decades accumulates beneath the surface a vast collection of shared memories, moments and desires. Fragments such as these form the heart of our collective identities.

This piece in Veszprém aims to be a fragment of a much larger structure – the pinnacle of a Venetian bell tower meeting the extravagant geometry of an early New York skyscrapers crown – just a hint at a submerged world below.

Oddly impractical in its function, the piece invites intrigue – almost open yet simultaneously hard to enter, seemingly habitable yet slightly too cramped, almost human scale but a little too squat. In this it invites mischief– every way of using the structure is ‘wrong’ as there is no ‘right’.

When inside you are obscured from view and cramped – it necessitates intimacy. You are bathed in lilac, the colour of nostalgia - of innocence and youth. Lilac is affection, first loves and gentle romance. Dowsed in this colour, the piece exists as a hazy apparition of a forgotten moment - an abstracted, unreal monument ready to absorb new memories and desires.