Worm Wood with Tereza Stehlikova

A longform and longterm collaboration with the artist Tereza Stehlikova, running 2015 to 2020. We have been exploring the environs of industrial West London creating a film in chapters, alongside new performances, events, publications and a month long exhibition as part of an extended residency with the Dissenter's Chapel at Kensal Green Cemetery in 2017.

On January 30th 2020 a 63 minute version of Worm Wood was screened at Whitechapel Gallery Cinema.

Worm Wood at Kensal Green Cemetery Dissenter’s Chapel exhibition 2017

Please visit www.stevenjfowler.com/wormexhibition For more information on the 2017 summer exhibition. This page features not only images from the exhibition and the residency Tereza and I had in the cemetery throughout the summer, but also videos from the multiple events we staged. These included an Landscape Learn architect collaboration with walking tour on July 15th 2017, a celebration of Erich Fried with the Austrian Cultural Forum and an Echooing Green event with Chris McCabe.

A timeline of the Worm Wood project, from 2015 to 2020

  • Filming continues in and after lockdown : Summer 2020

  • Screening of feature length Worm Wood film at Whitechapel Gallery Cinema : January 31st 2020

  • Worm Wood features in Nemeses - selected collaborations of SJ Fowler : October 2019

  • Screening of Worm Wood short film at The Garden Museum : February 2018

  • Reading and screening at Offside Books, Kilburn : January 2018

  • Exhibition and residency at Kensal Green Cemetery : August 3rd to September 3rd 2017

  • Publication of Worm Wood in Old Oak, a short story by SJ Fowler, with Sampson Low : July 2017

  • Landscape Learn architect collaboration with walking tour : July 15th 2017

  • Shooting begins in summer 2015 and continues in March and August of 2016, July and August 2017, July 2018, May and October 2019.

All of Tereza Stehlikova’s brilliant writings on the Worm Wood filming sessions

A note on : Filming Worm Wood with Stehlikova, Gibbons, Davidson June 26, 2020

Filming again, Tereza Stehlikova and I’s film about disappearing / terraformed West London, and its mysteries, continues to grow, this time in the glowing boil of a heatwave. We were joined with others for this day, which is a rarity. www.stevenjfowler.com/wormwood

I’ve been in residence with J&L Gibbons for six years now, that is to say I have built a wonderful friendship with landscape architects Jo Gibbons and Neil Davidson, and their team, over many years. We meet occasionally and they lay out all their remarkable work for me, bringing me into their processes, their conceptual thinking, their pragmatic practise - their constant efforts to think laterally and liminally with the design and shape of the places we live. They are inspiring people - outgoing, passionate, tireless, considered and considerate. Rarely do I meet people operating at such a high level of effect on the world around us who are never lost within a private professional culture or other personal motivation by the very demands of that work. (Worth checking out their new website too https://jlg-london.com/Practice)

Introducing Tereza and Jo and Neil a few years ago led to some grand moments, most especially in Kensal Green Cemetery and The Garden Museum, so it was natural we would get together to film. We met at Willesden Junction, traced Scrubs Lane down past towering new high rise flats, named Notting Hill Genesis - the beginning of all things. The new development Oold Ooak continues to grow, ebbing over the west lands, clearing space, jutting up into skylines. No Trellick Towers in stone, just rows of glassy plastic flats coming together, built by workers who poured through the lockdown still labouring at risk. Thousands of new homes coming, the HS2 burrowing underneath. Haunts now becoming glossy magazines alive, stuffed full of more people where there is now nearly no one. But us. We joined Wormwood Scrubs at its most northwestern tip, the scrubland as persuasive, quiet, welcoming and atmospheric as ever, before coming back to the grand union canal to finish. It’s a route I must’ve walked 300 times or more. Never with my friends, capturing snippets of conversation, knowing one day the brief connections will be part of the greater whole Tereza and I have been building

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A note on : filming Worm Wood as lockdown unlocks May 29, 2020

Off the back of screening Worm Wood at the Whitechapel Gallery this january 2020, Tereza Stehlikova once again headed to industrial west london to document, and interact with, the strange environs of willesden junction and the grand union canal.

It was a swampy, murky, sweltering day. We saw clouds in the distance of a fire we couldn’t find. For the first time ever we could see the canal water clean through, with fish shoals and thick waterweeds. Cyclists ignorantly drove past us at reckless speed. We traced the route we’ve down so many times, for the first time, filming, in 2020, from Mitre Bridge, over to Hythe Road and around Car Giant, dipping in and out of alleyways and tunnels. I had on my flimsy breathing mask, walking stick and parrot outfit and though we were somehow tracing old steps, it felt new, full of the usual unexpected minor idiosyncrasies and weird melting boiling summer heads.

A note on : Screening wormwood film at Whitechapel Gallery Cinema

January 31, 2020

Pretty heartening to sell out the whitechapel gallery cinema for the first screening of the film Tereza Stehlikova and I have made about willesden junction and 1000 other things. It was a really good night to show the film, the audience was generous. Watching a film i was in and around and a lynch pin of, arguably, but not feeling like its creator or filmmaker or writer, was wonderful. I was able to enjoy it objectively, admire Tereza’s achievement. It is a meditative, hypnotic, allusive, symbolic film. It flows with jarring imagery like the place it celebrates. We chatted after the screening with David Spittle about the film a little bit

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Worm Wood filming November 3, 2019

Into our fifth year of collaboration, Tereza Stehlikova and I will be screening our film WORM WOOD at the end of January 2020 at Whitechapel Gallery cinema. In light of that we are filming plenty now. http://www.stevenjfowler.com/wormwood

Began in 2015, Worm Wood has taken in publication, exhibition, event and the film, but really its about our collaboration and the levels on which that operates as something of a friendship expression / pedagogy / open method. We have just improvised our way, without end goal, without conclusion in mind or narrative, for years.

I suppose its about the industrial and reclusive landscapes of these areas of London, a place that is not obsessed with itself. And how they are changing as the massive new old oak development has come in and begins to grow and terraform a beautiful ugly place into something ugly ugly new plastic shiny glass and valuable.

Tereza wrote a typically elegant piece on our latest filming day also on our site https://cinestheticfeasts.com/2019/11/04/wormwood-car-giant/

“It’s a Sunday, a rainy afternoon in November. Rather than a Sunday roast, Steve and I opt for roaming the liminal landscapes of Willesden Junction, our old trusted friend. It’s unpretentious spirit offers us great sense of solitude, with no pressure to know what we want, be goal oriented, be professional. Here we are, free.

It’s a year 2019 already, and back in the Car Giant’s territories, Steve and I have been fortunate to discover the entrance into the otherworldly Giant’s Diner. What joy! Steve appears ecstatic as he rushes into the doorway!

I follow him eagerly up the glowing staircase, a ship about to be launched into space. Soon enough, having entered what could be a new Punchdrunk set, I expect alternative realities behind every door. The universe here is plastic, blue, resembling the anonymous non-places of ferries, airports and train stations. Where are we sailing off to?”

Filming Worm Wood with Tereza Stehlikova May 13, 2019

A fixture of my summer, all the way to 2015 now, to spend time with my friend and long-term collaborator Tereza Stehlikova, shooting footage for our film Worm Wood, about the private and disappearing wonder of corners of west london, its unique and unpretentious character, from out across kensal green cemetery to wormwood scrubs and the grand union canal. Our plan is to have no plan, to keep shooting in sections, with poetry and text responding, in many different cinematic aesthetics and compiling, as years go by, and the film grows, into an artwork but also a document, as its made through our friendship and the joy of its being made. The work has been really rewarding, offering insight into where I once called home as an active, absorbing, inspiring space and Tereza is really an artist whose mode I admire.

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The film has been screened across London in chapters, and our previous iterations of this long term work has taken in readings, pamphlets, walks, exhibitions from the Garden Museum to Crypts full of the dead. We are working towards a screening of the film in a new over 60 minute version this autumn or winter, in London. http://terezast.com/ / www.stevenjfowler.com/wormwood

Filming WormWood July 6, 2018

after a beautiful summer in kensal green cemetery in 2017, tereza stehlikova and i have continued collaborating on our overall longterm project - a film that explores the hidden corners of industrial west london and its oncoming disappearance beneath the old oak development thing. we've been shooting extended scenes in certain locales on the grand union canal and ive been writing texts. the new films, chapters, will be screened later in the year, as the first was at the garden museum and other venues over the last 12 months. http://terezast.com/

Willesden Junction is the same. Goodbye ozone layer.
One bridge, a concentration on small vanishing places.
An example is the bridge over the canal, the grand union canal. that leads to the hythe road estate. they have 300 cctv cameras roaming, 24 hours a day.

Booklets from the Worm Wood project, both short fiction, available to buy for £2.50, click the image

Stills from the film, 2020

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#1 Origins of the Worm Wood project

Began in 2015, the primary outcome of the project is a film which fuses the industrial and reclusive landscapes of these areas of London with poetry and text, as well as live events, installations embedded in the environment, an exhibition of these works and a publication forthcoming.

Worm Wood crosses artforms, is fundamentally collaborative across concept, text and image, and aims to be as nebulous and striking as the landscape it celebrates.

"We should see if we can get permission to use that shed on stilts as an installation. If not, locate something hidden in the spiderweb of the stations grounds, or a part not used often, or something small, unreachable through the fence on the long walk to Harrow Road.

Pulling a handful of hair. Uprooting a small tree.

This place is not obsessed with itself. I think there’s a difference in that, one we’ve both noticed. There is one stop here, located momentarily. A fusion that spills out in eight directions, spiders legs. Our favourite is the snipers alley off the Harrow Road entrance, where we will enter."