A travel without visual experience © Pak Sheung-chuen
A travel without visual experience started in Malaysia where Pak Sheung-chuen traveled blinded. Having to rely on his other senses to feel and guide himself along the journey, his photos document what he is supposed to have seen. On the gallery stand, the viewer is invited to re-enact the experience by taking pictures of his pictures in a darkened room, hoping to witness the journey later from the camera.
Conceived like a "mise en abyme", the room is a parallel space, a mirror where to watch the past.
© Pak Sheung-chuen
The extraordinary with Pak Sheung-chuen lies in the ordinary of life existence so he'll shop for the words of a supermaket bill, wait for all the people sleep, collect his breath, wait for a potential friend to turn up at a busy train station, as ways to explore randomness in urban environment.
Pak Sheung-chuen inhabits the world in a rather playful manner, using his mind as an ultimate place of freedom.
Making do and getting by © Richard Wentworth
The narratives of Making do and getting by record hypothetic urban gestures, scenarios made out of "nothing", in a state of deambulation, of non-directed action. But also an intuitive sense of timing and spatial direction. As Francis Alÿs puts it : sometimes to make something is really to make nothing; and paradoxically, sometimes to make nothing is to make something.
An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty © Artangel © Richard Wentworth
Playful hazards led Wentworth through his project An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty : it took time to understand what to do as Artangel gave him too much freedom. At the time King Cross' hectic crossroads carried the perfumes of a red light district, the Eurostar tunnel was still being raised and the area was mostly industrial, derelict, not an obvious place for art but a place he was found of.
© Container city @ Trinity Buoy Wharf
After visiting the original Container City at Trinity Buoy wharf, where stacked shipping containers are recycled into living modules, Wentworth thought of using a viewing platform. The idea informed the choice of a site, a General Plumbing Supplies store overlooking King Cross station with ceilings high enough to build a staircase and install a periscope above the roofs.
To use the space seen from the top of the staircase down into the store, Wentworth needed to create a kind of action.
This explains the idea of a ping-pong tournament and tables imprinted with A to Z map, turning the local warehouse into a meeting place, a geographical site for observation.
The viewers who entered the space didn't always know what to make of it but it gave them a right to their city, a right for leisure and play. Above all, it created a place out of time, need and purpose.
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.
