Gone to build a stage in the wild

C.R.A.S.H contigency © Lab of ii


In the summer of 2009, during the Two degree festival, a series of art events and installation urgently concerned with climate change and involving the public, the artist Richard Dedomenici landed a fake-aircraft in the courtyard of the Arts Admin studios. 

 Plane food cafe © Richard Dedomenici


After boarding in the Plane food cafe, passengers were encouraged to quickly eat a blend veggie curry - straight from London City airport -, while gazing at a movie showing pigeons being accidently smashed by aircrafts. Not so tasty but as fast and effective as flying and eating can be.




C.R.A.S.H contigency © Lab of ii

In the evening the Laboratory of insurrectionary imagination invited its viewers to self-conduct a radical happening in the middle of the City. 
After voting a set of actions by consensus-making, in the spirit of Reclaim the streets and the Climate Camps, they headed towards Square miles equipped with wheelbarrows and plants donated by local permaculture growers.
In the middle of Spitafield market, an area recently turned into a Business mecca with CCTV 24 hours surveillance, our crew somehow devised to set up a temporary camp with fully functioning kitchen. 
When the police finally came, the initial passive aggressive imperative to evacuate turned into a more friendly chit-chat around some freshly brewed elderflower tea, and as they left gifted with individual potted plants, it seems as if even them had joined in the party.

Energy cafe, Gunpowder park 2009 © Pilot Publishing

Later that summer, we also went to build a stage in the wild with Pilot Publishing. Their Energy Cafe was more than a resource on renewable energy and sustainability which transformed Gunpowder Park into a Temporary Autonomous Zone. 
The landscape was reclaimed as common space as locals were invited to forage plants from the surrounding wilderness : anyone who joined could cook by the fire and eat under the stars by the sound of music. 

12 square metres and toilet

The toilet © Ilya & Emilia Kabakov

I owe my discovery of Ilya Kabakov's The toilet to a postcard. As I didn't see his replica of a russian public toilet in the flesh, it took time to understand what I was looking at : a table dressed with plates and glasses, some chairs, in fact a domestic interior with strange architectural sense - tiny windows, unusual partition walls and lime scale on their top. At first one makes sense of what is recognisable, the sense of familiar holding attention, until the nauseous lime scale echoed a sense of dirt, things old and rotten, things that have no place at home.
When the sense of smell took over the visual sense - taste of urine-smelling food -, images of homelessness, survivalism, keeping normality in degrading environments emerged.
For the visitors of the Documenta, the revelation had gone the other way round : after queuing in front of a rough toilet, they found a homely place without smell or filthy graffiti but paintings on the walls, sofa, children playpen and the rests of a dinner. 
I can't tell what prevails from the experience : the thought that the familiar may carries dark secret, a new sense of home from finding domesticity in the least expected place.
Kabakov's staged interiors transcend his position as a russian artist living in the West, he describes them as total installations and their effect, one of engulfment : they hold us with their sense of familiar and tell more than we thought about our intimate world.





















12 Square Meters © Zhang Huan © The Asia Society

Promiscuity and collectivism, the plea of totalitarian regimes, when the boundaries between public and private spaces remain blurred, recall a performance by Zhang Huan. 
An iconic image by photographer Rong Rong shows him naked and covered with flies as he sits on a smelly latrine : after hours of keeping the pose, turning into a peaceful enduring monk, he enters a pond, cleanses and disappears.
Five years after Tienanmen, Zhang Huan breaks away from two censorship rules : nudity and politics, reflecting on the rise of forced infanticides and abortions. 
Ten years later, the chinese writer Chi Li describes similar conditions in the Wuhan : constant queuing in transports and at work, sharing and fighting at communal rooms, lack of privacy and  one-child policy.

Spot 79

Spot 79 - 2009 © Analucia Feracci

Spot 79 is a walking garden which is temporary growing in a Permaculture centre. The plankton observed in the garden survived an oil spill in sea waters. Part of many unusual phenomenons provoked by human pollution, this new form of life relates to the red water cancer, an invasion of killing algae that asphyxiate all sea life.

Spot 79, 2009 © Analucia Feracci

The plankton slowly gave life to a colony of crustacean-algae : the plants came to life, moved around, getting closer to one another.

As the garden became a place for observation, it opened onto other experiments influenced by the social life of plants like The Garden in motion and the third landscape observed by botanist Gilles Clement. 

It echoes the vibrations of plants and wildlife intelligence which Jeremy Narby explores in Intelligence in nature and Cosmic Serpent : DNA and the Origins of Knowledge; to summarise, the transmission of (molecular) knowledge between plant species and Amazonian Shamans.