Spotted this beautiful photography project in Haggerston this morning. Huge faces peering out of windows! Such a simple and effective way to make people visible and real - the street felt welcoming with all the cheery smiles. Found myself smiling back...
More: www.iamhere.org.uk
This weekend I went to the AAH open house weekend (Artists at Home). in west London, and wandered around some stranger's houses...
House one belongs to Jonathan Mercer from Starch Green - a wood engraver with an impressive handlebar moustache and a tiny garden shed with a 150 year old printing press. He is sprinkling talcum powder on a wood carving to show up the intricate hand carved design.
He told us that when making the large wood carved illustrations in early newspapers, the image would be sketched out on lots of little blocks bolted together. These were then unbolted, shared among the young boys who had a day to complete their section. At the end of the day, they were bolted back together and the master engraver ensured the parts matched, ready to be sent to the paper press for the next day's news. As Jonathan notes, an early example of the hive mind...
House two belongs to Sandi Friend - a photographer who decided to show the visual story of her street over a week in April. There are portrait images of her neighbours up on nearly all the walls in the house, and she had invited them all round to see their photos the night before.
As we turn up, one of the models (from up the road) was seeing her photo for the first time. The conversation went something like "and that's so and so, from just up the road, they are the couple opposite you..."
It was fascinating to be let into someone's home and share what they do. It's somewhere we normally keep private, and it built a level of trust and intimacy to break that convention and be welcomed in.
A theatre company in Birmngham is explosring the small things it can do to make the city better,
On a microcosmic level, how can an individual improve life for the collective whole? What small change can one person effect that touches the lives of many? What if, in this City of a million people, everyone took just one minute each day to tidy, dust, mop or polish a square of communal space. How would our citadel shine then?
Stan's Cafe has been looking around its home City and spotting small things that could make it a better place. Realizing how easy it would be to step in and take on a few of these little tasks the company is under taking a series of performances to improve things.
On 24th May the company will position itself at the Arrivals Gate at Terminal 1 of Birmingham International Airport to provide a warm welcome for visitors and valued citizens returning home.
On 25th May the company will be providing a friendly concierge service for the taxi rank at Snow Hill Station during peak periods.
These are the first two in a planed sequence of actions. If you would like to help either by volunteering your time to this project or by submitting your suggestions for future acts of improvement we would be delighted to hear from you.
Together With Love We Will Make This Citadel Glorious.
N.B. As of the end of September Stan's Cafe will cease to be funded by Birmingham City Council.
FEAST Toronto grant recipient Sean Martindale and a team of about a dozen urban interventionists took part in a weekend-long installation of Outside the Planter Boxes, intended to highlight some of the neglected city tree planter boxes that line our busy streets by staging a number of creative interventions.
Bottom-up nudge?
Hurray! Beautiful new posters from Anthony Burrill
Building on my earlier post on the in-between I want to share a project which I learned about over the weekend: Kus-en-sloop. Situated in de Afrikaanderwijk in the South of Rotterdam this temporary hotel is situated in an area which is very at the starting point of a big transition. Many houses will be refurbished or demolished, new green spaces will be developed and an overall enhancement of this troubled area. Together with Vestia, the housing corporation owning a large percentage of all the houses in this area Bureau M.E.S.T. has created the concept of KUS-housing:
An empty house which, right before being demolished or undergoing an intense transition, is made use of in a different manner. Normally these houses are the basis of the loneliness and emptiness which haunts these neighbourhoods, they are now transformed into places which form the basis for the transition of the neighbourhood. (…) The rooms are designed by local artists and built using local materials which come from houses demolished earlier. This makes the project 100% local.
The name kus-en-sloop is well picked because it combines several meanings in one: kussensloop (pillowcase); kiss-and-demolish; but also kiss and ride.
A Little Book of Friendly Services is a delightful community piece by Emily Colombo that has come out of Brokencitylab's 30 Day SRSI project.
I am now the proud guardian of a bubbly kilner jar of kefir grains. They are sitting on the kitchen top in the sunlight, bobbling up and down through the milky water like a lava lamp. I will feed them sugar and wash them twice a week and I feel somehow slightly more responsible than I did yesterday.
The gifted kefir is part of an art project by Synnove Fredericks, and is being run from the FARM:shop in Dalston. The idea is to cultivate the kefir, and as it expands, portion off small jars to give to people who want to experiment and grow their own (small donation for growing instructions leaflet). They then get marked on the map, and report back with pictures and stories.
Kefir grains are a mix of bacteria and yeasts, and can be used to make all sorts of fermented foods that are good for digestive health, such as yoghurt drink, ginger beer or kimchi pickled vegetables. I'm addicted to the yoghurt kefir from the Russian shop up the road, with a slightly tangy flavour and little creamy lumps (bordering on fizzy when open for a while). Perhaps it's an acquired taste, but I'm looking forward to making my own when my little grains have multiplied enough.
Synnove is an artist and designer interested in our interaction with natural surroundings, and is currently looking into nomadic agriculture. More on her website.
If you would like to see the installation come to FARM:shop. If you want a jar of the next batch, email Synnove.
The Laundromat Project is a community-based public art non-profit that brings arts programming to laundromats in the Greater New York area through two core programs: Create Change Public Artist Residency and Works in Progress. Both programs seek to raise the quality of life for people whose incomes do not guarantee broad access to mainstream arts and cultural facilities.
Totally brilliant!
Just stumbled across this gallery of photos from New York photographer Jordan Matter. I LOVE the idea that people are walking round with mad skills, hidden under the routine of daily life, just waiting to bust out and handstand down an escalator. Makes me want to do cartwheels down the streets of east London...
See more: Dancers Among Us
This afternoon, courtesy of Linda Clarke from Westminster, I learnt that Somers Town was historically famous for making bricks. The mud from the brick fields was mixed with ash and rubbish, recycling the dirt of London back into the materials building the city - which is satisfyingly circular.
I was there to visit 52 Phoenix Road - a pop-up community space organised by the Make Do Collective (Lucia and Mark) and drop off a picture for an exhibition on Thur 16 Dec, being put on by Untitled Space (Andy and Nick). If you want to put something up, you need to get it to them by Weds 15 Dec, so super quick!
There's lots of other interesting things going on over the next couple of weeks including a film screening and community eat-in, check it out...
(speaking of circular, I was there because Untitled Andy is a friend of my friend's ex-housemate, and it turns out Make Do Lucia is a flat mate of my ex-colleague from the RSA . Neat.)
So, what did y'all get up to on Saturday? Bit of a lie-in? Nice warm lazy brunch? Get dressed up in a blue mac and recreate the legend of King Canute on Brighton seafront as part of a worldwide art exhibition to highlight the impact of climate change? Numb toes from the cold, but a great atmostphere and hopefully a few more people thinking a little more about the impact of our lifestyles...
(I'm in the top wave, a few people in from the left)
350eARTh is the world’s first ever global climate art project. In over a dozen places across the globe, citizens and artists will create massive public art installations to show how climate change is already impacting our world as well as offer visions of how we can solve the crisis. Each art installation will be large enough to be seen from space and documented by satellites.
Limited edition of 200 posters, screen printed with oil from the Gulf of Mexico disaster by Anthony Burrill. The oil was picked up on the beaches of Grand Isle, Louisiana
"Broken City Lab is an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research group that tactically disrupts and engages the city, its communities, and its infrastructures to reimagine the potential for action in the collapsing post-industrial city of Windsor, Ontario.
The processes of Broken City Lab remain grounded in the lab’s observations and concerns about Windsor, as a city, as a community, and as a network of infrastructure, and aim to do two things: first, Broken City Lab works through interventionist tactics to adjust, critique, annotate, and re-imagine the city that we encounter; secondly, through these interventions, the lab seeks to educate, inspire, and facilitate a new way of viewing the potential for interacting with and in the city."
Via: Belinda Lester
An installation called Autarchy which 'pays homage to the uncomplicated, the simple and the everyday'.
Senior Show from Megan Deal
Always Feel Welcome created A 300-page book which they designed live during the Pop!Tech 72-hour conference, printed with custom variable covers and overnight shipped to each participant.
Choijeonghwa's Happy Together Los Angeles 2009 exhibition
Knitted Gardens book by Jan Messent.
Fabric vegetables by Scholten & Baijings exhibited during Milan Design Week 2010.
Isabel Berglund is a textile designer/artist Graduated from The Danish Design School and with a MA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. She has exhibited in a wide range of venues, most recently in the exhibition “Hanging wood” at Dansk Fashion and Textile and with the sculptures “Home with a tree” in the exhibition “Fabric for Thought” at Koldinghus Museum. Isabel Berglund will show her work during the Milan Design Week at two different venues; “Closet knitter” at Mindcraft 10, Via Savona 55/A and the other one “Home with a tree” at Spazio Rossana Orlandi, Via Matteo Bandello 14/16.
Via: David Report
We Live Now - a Community of Happiness ...
"We are a growing collection of friends, powerfully pursuing the notion of 'living now'. Communicating through artwork, literature, relationships, exhibitions and more. Engaging our participants to live conscious and happy lives!"
"From the mythical cradle of human thought in the Garden of Eden, to the farthest reaches of human imagination, the map plots out mankind's achievements, trials, and tribulations throughout history. We have constructed a world made up of our own actions and beliefs, as much as the one formed by the land we live on. The map of humanity is formed by our thought, our feelings, our dreams, and our nightmares."
Via: Nicola Avery
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