Acapulco to Byker
Peter Merrington and Tijana Stevanović
2014, Installation
Acapulco to Byker was created by collective of researchers and artists at Newcastle University led by Peter Merrington and Tijana Stevanović for the exhibition The Partial Index at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art’s project space BALTIC 39 in summer 2014. To create the installation the group printed and displayed 800 digital images from an abandoned social history archive that documented the Byker district of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK during the 20th century. This photographic archive contained digital copies of images donated by residents living in the iconic Byker Wall housing estate built in the 1970s and 1980s by architect Ralph Erskine. lacking metadata or any reference terms or organised structure, the collection of images only existed in a series of folders with obscure labels, some defined by the photographer but most unattributed. To create a new display and provide a new indexical form for the archive, images from the collection were selected by the group to correspond with each term in JG Ballard’s 1977 experimental fiction work, ‘The Index’. Ballard’s disjunctive narrative tells the story of a mysterious character who traverses the major geopolitical events of the 20th century, but told in the form of a literary index. Developing a fragile sense of fictive narrative, the resulting assemblage retold both these stories together. The work sought to address the ambiguities of indexing in the act of archiving, drawing out questions of judgement, authorship and validity in the curatorial process. Aligning each image with a term from Ballard’s text broke the indexical and authentic relationship of the photograph to its object. The process of making the display questioned indexicality through this playful gesture. In doing so, it also sought to recover the lost value of the abandoned archive by repurposing the images through this uncertain mediation. 
Exhibitions and presentations
2017 Pointed or Pointless? Recalibrating the Index Part II, Brandenburg Center for Media Studies, Potsdam
2014 Staging Acapulco to Byker: Critical Waves, Birkbeck College, ICA, Resonance FM
2014 A Partial Index, BALTIC 39, Newcastle, UK