THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

The dodgem jockey, clinging uninvited to your car – your one, the one you’ve paid, down-payed for – represents the figure of the stranger lodged within the home. He’s the Unheimliche, the Uncanny, stuck onto you like an incubus. What better image for the gypsy in the popular imagination, its fantasies and fears? Within the fairground, this rickety, nomadic mobile city brought to you on trucks, the bumper-car ride, mise-en-scéne of rickety mobility, sits like a miniature reproduction of the whole. These men, then, restlessly moving between moving cars, replicate yet again the overall condition of nomadism: a regressiveness that partakes of infinity. Through such endless repetitions, they both multiply and merge with other quasi-folkloric characters who populate the margins of our consciousness: cowboys, for example, hired hands exhorting mutinous, anarchic herds to follow a course that, if no two of its individual paths are identical, nonetheless amalgamates to a coherent whole; or logjammers, riding the very masses they prod and coral, skipping between these as the bump and roll, teasing equilibrium from the rim of chaos; or linesmen dangling from pylons as sparks leap into the air around their heads, whispering into their ears (and only theirs) the static, white-noise secrets of the firmament.

(McCarthy/Jellyfish)