On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

Un: Place – A curation by Beatrice Jarvis, exhibition opens 3 June – 20 July at the Jerwood café

Alys Williams / Benjamin Bailey / Seecum Cheung / Ilona Sagar / Dana Macpherson / Inzajeano Latif

An exhibition of personal cartographies and urban responses

Six artists have each created a piece of work that responds directly to the landscape of Jerwood Space, an iconic building situated in the heart of bustling Bankside. This reclaimed area between London Bridge and Waterloo is steeped in fragmented traces of lingering history, where passages of time are lost in hidden corners and marked histories are glimpsed on decaying facades.

The city has and will always remain a myriad of inspiration, This exhibition explores the creative relationship between the city and the individual to develop unique personal cartographies ; relearning mapping as an intricate interaction of the imagination in a diversity of forms and media.

Jerwood Space
171 Union Street
London
SE1 OLN

www.jerwoodspace.co.uk or www.jerwoodvisualarts.org

Paradise Place Birmingham 2007 by Martin Hartland

My visit to Birmingham last month was the occasion to take the pulse of the city and revisit some of its architectural landmarks. I was naturally drawn to the closing evening of the Flatpack festival where three documentaries were shown to celebrate the life and work of John Madin, the Birmingham architect who is responsible for so much of the city’s post-war redevelopment. The screenings were followed by a panel discussion which was timely for one important reason: his creations are now bulldozed or threatened with iminent demolition. The BBC Pebble Mill and Post & Mail building have gone already, and more worringly the Central Library is next on the list.

Birmingham’s tumultuous relationship with modernism began in the 50s, at the time when numerous Victorian buildings were targeted by policy-makers on the grounds of unsoundness and inadequacy. One must acknowledge that the language of brutalist architecture demands a bit of getting used to: born out of utopian and visionary schemes of functionalism and segregation of traffic flows, it has resulted in monumental slabs of raw concrete, varyingly described as inhuman, insensitive or lifeless – not to mention the ‘urine-scented’ underpasses. Modernism is still the subject of a fierce debate, particularly in conservative England: between those who feel it is ugly and irrelevant, and those who feel that by erasing all trace of it we are in danger of blindly repeating post-war mistakes.

Nonetheless, the films presented here were an interesting occasion to put in perspective yesterday’s grand plans of tabula rasa for a clean and efficient urban system lasting “for the next 100 years” with today’s conception of modern ‘urban living’: new, shiny, glazed – and disconnected from the past, thus raising interesting questions about the changing notions and purposes of urban planning and architectural heritage. One major theme that came through during the public discussion was the increasing re-purposing of the city as a haven for shoppers and consumers rather than a public space owned by its inhabitants. Hailing a newly built shop [Selfridges] as the icon of a city bidding to become the 2008 European Capital of Culture was clearly a twisted symbol, for the very idea that consumer culture is rooted in the world of illusion and ephemera. Incidentally, the Bullring and the surrounding shopping area have already aged dramatically in their very short life.

I’m still grappling to understand the city’s attitude to the idea of architectural legacy; Why this constant need to reinvent itself? It’s as if Birmingham was somewhat ashamed and unable to come to terms with its past, and that only by erasing it, it could move forward – the city’s motto.

In the case of the Central Library, the council’s claims of structural issues look at best quite shaky and disputable, at worst more like an attempt to disguise a shift in architectural taste. Razing a building because it has fallen out of fashion is is not just short-sighted, it is expensive – especially at a time when many parts of the city are neglected and could do with a refurbishment. The recent ruling of English Heritage in favour of the listing of the Central Library came as a blow to the council’s plans. Yet city planners have also argued that the Central Library was an obstacle to the realisation of a east/west trans-urban axis. Obstruction? They have a point: as a place for free thinking and enlightenment in such a central location, the library is an obstruction to profitable shopping and spending. Alas, the latest wave of urban regeneration seems more driven by commercial motives than a genuine concern and respect for the wellbeing of people.

Six Men: John Madin, architect (BBC2, 1965, 30 min)

Friends of the Central Library

The Guardian – Society | Razed Stakes

art [espace] public est un cycle de rencontres-débats rassemblant chaque année à la Sorbonne plusieurs centaines de participants : artistes oeuvrant dans l’espace public, acteurs et penseurs de l’urbain, opérateurs culturels, professionnels, étudiants et chercheurs attentifs à ce que font les artistes dans (et de) l’espace public, curieux de la manière dont peuvent se nouer les liens entre création, cultures, populations et territoires. art [espace] public est proposé par le Master professionnel Projets Culturels dans l’Espace Public (université Paris 1), en partenariat avec Stradda, magazine de la création hors les murs.

Parce que les espaces publics sont de plus en plus normalisés, privatisés, surveillés, parce que les récits formatés du storytelling saturent les imaginaires de manières et de matières souvent insignifiantes, parce que la « misère symbolique » croît, il nous semble nécessaire de suivre ces tentatives d’invention d’autres récits, d’autres images, d’autres lieux de rencontre et de partage, ici et ailleurs, qui essaient d’activer ou de réactiver la dimension publique de l’espace public, son caractère poétique et/ou politique.

Première rencontre-débat le 30 janvier à 19h à la Sorbonne : “La fabrique de l’urbanité”, avec Alexandre Chemetoff, architecte et paysagiste, grand prix de l’urbanisme (2000), et François Delarozière, concepteur de machines de spectacle, notamment des Machines de l’Île à Nantes (http://www.lesmachines-nantes.fr).

Puis :

• Les nouvelles écritures du graffiti – Vendredi 6 février 2009, 19h-21h. La Sorbonne, amphi Richelieu.
• Comment produire des espaces publics ? Projets d’artistes et expériences culturelles – Vendredi 13 février 2009, 19h-21h. Lieu indiqué par mail après inscription.
• La ville mobile à l’oeuvre – Vendredi 20 février 2009, 19h-21h. La Sorbonne, amphi Richelieu.
• L’espace public, espace des possibles – Vendredi 27 février 2009, 19h-21h. La Sorbonne, amphi Richelieu.
• La fabrique de l’urbanité – Vendredi 6 mars 2009, 19h-21h. La Sorbonne, amphi Descartes.
• Le Grand Paris nous appartient, ou la culture métropolitaine partagée – Vendredi 13 mars 2009, 19h-21h. Lieu indiqué par mail après inscription.

Pour découvrir le programme détaillé (trente invités, sept rendez-vous) : http://www.art-espace-public.c.la

http://www.armelhostiou.com/

BRENTFORD BIOPSY
April 5 – June 15

During April and May 2008, Watermans gallery will be converted into a live design/mapping studio where investigatory, locative media artist Christian Nold together with the designer Daniela Boraschi will be working with local residents to gather information for digital and physical visualizations of the ecological, cultural and economic ‘health’ of Brentford.

Instead of taking tissue samples as one would from a human being Christian Nold and participants will be using a range of cultural probes to investigate the local social body and its unique ailments. Like eastern medicine investigators will be taking a holistic view of
Brentford that looks for interconnections between problems and challenges to get a sense of the whole. The project acts as both creative art project as well as hard-nosed consultation with invited stakeholder groups like politicians, historians, the local chamber of commerce as well as ecologists and the general public.

More info: www.publicbiopsy.net.

Art [Espace] Public est un cycle de dix rencontres-débat proposées à Paris du 25 janvier au 28 mars 2008 par le Master Projets Culturels dans l’Espace Public de l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, en partenariat avec HorsLesMurs, centre national de ressources des arts de la rue et des arts du cirque, sous la direction de Pascal Le Brun-Cordier.
Différentes formes de pratiques artistiques dans l’espace public sont ainsi évoquées et questionnées par des artistes, opérateurs culturels, chercheurs, critiques d’art, flâneurs, spectateurs et acteurs de l’urbain.

Radio Grenouille propose en libre-accès trois enregistrements des conférences, sur les thèmes suivants:

• Dans les interstices des villes…
• La ville, comment ça sonne ?
• La ville, comment ça marche ?

Infos sur le site Art [Espace] Public.

site du Master Projets Culturels dans l’Espace Public.

In his text The Theory of Dérive (1956), Guy Debord seeked to convince the reader to let emotions resonate when looking at and experiencing urban spaces; The Dérive – the French word for an aimless stroll – institutes the city as a network of narratives, of experiences and events. Space itself becomes the product of inhabiting. “To dérive is to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed. It is very much a matter of using an environment for one’s own ends, seeking not only the marvellous beloved by surrealism but bringing an inverted perspective to bear on the entirety of the spectacular world.” ¹

The Dérive is somewhat related to Flânerie, a word coined in the mid-eighteenth century by the French poet Charles Baudelaire to describe the typically Parisian leisurely exploration of city streets by pedestrians, detached observers of the industrial metropolis. The Dérive can also be likened to the surrealist street adventures of André Breton ², in which night promenades in the city are raised by a succession of dreamlike impressions and romantic fantasies.

¹ Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationst INternational in a Postmodern Age. London and New York : Routledge, 1992.

² André Breton, Nadja . Paris : Gallimard, 1927.

When writing Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, Guy Debord was seeking a new way of life in the observation of certain processes of chance and predictability in the streets:

“The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places – these phenomena all seem to be neglected.” ¹

Debord observed how he could extract urban areas that had been drawn through and delineated by the emotional and behavioural responses to those spaces that conformist town-planning would ignore. His psychogeographic map entitled “The Naked City” (illustration) shows the fragmented experience of pedestrian wanderings, where meaning is found through walking the streets instead of motoring through them, where it is the pedestrian who creates a mental ordering of the cityscape instead of the city forcefully imposing its structure upon the individual character of these experiences.

¹ Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, in Les Lèvres Nues # 6, September 1955