ARTISTS INTENTIONS
Are to rock the world.
seriously though,
Slab city ///
Artistic
Statement of a pavement dweller.
As in any
area connected with the growth of neighborhoods in big cities, the
transformation of its streets and the services offered are part of the fabric
formed by its inhabitants.
I think of Robert Smithson when he once referred to
something called ‘architecture of entropy’[1]. The idea of entropy comes from our
understanding of a mathematical equation that permits us to measure the degree
to which physical matter disarranges itself with the passage of time. The same
definition can be applied to our current architectural regeneration era.
‘If
society won’t build for this mass of people, don’t they have the right to build
for themselves?’[2]
Interested in not exactly the situation itself but in the
flow of communication in the spaces between, my practice could be described as
a gathering of “evidence” and a dialogical exchange about a wealth anemic and
physically damaged world of questions that surround poverty, public space and
urban planning.
My practice is primarily concerned with the fundamental
question of how one can create social space in the city and presents a critique
of the social values of architecture as spectacle. I create work through a process
that resonates my experiences as a city resident, a flanuer, a victim of
homelessness and a street artist. The outcome of many artworks metamorphoses
into other spaces to accommodate a new position with the social self, and its
relevance to the topic on the liveability of cities, whilst many pieces also
point to the questions of the power of the resident versus the gentrificator.
Combining a practice full of photographs of luxurious ruined
landscapes, wall-size drawings of tangled celebration and energetic cities and
animation performances on the street, I try to elegantly portray a future that
simultaneously bears the repercussions of a capitalist present and the residue
of a production of our own space within an industrial past.
Applying the ‘New York New York [Las Vegas hotel]’
formula to Sheffield I try to clue into the exposure of the discontinuations in
the systems that surround us, the gaps and the relationships among them.
The action of importing loaded spaces and buildings into bleak environments is
a conscious decision to explore the commodity and emphasis a promise, or rather
the missing promise.
In the collages (untitled/shadow
cities/favela nice) of luxurious slums my engagement with partially recycled imagery-
both banal and iconic - shows that we are starting from a pre-existing reality.
The images propose a radical restructuring of constructability, improving
precarious conditions of habitability. The deconstruction and construction of
history and the implication of the new sort of social space is created, if only
in one moment.
Working from the philosophies and writings of Henri Lefebvre, Slum urban planning and Situationism, I try to bring to the table questions of: how do we create our own space; thus ‘the production of space’, and the ownership of it, and the aesthetics of poverty.
Always acting with the city and its streets in mind, my practice is the
do-it-yourself art that uses the barest of means to comment on the joys
and perils of urban poverty – such as the asphalt or fly posters. Becoming an interventionist artist, my work seeks
to provoke a dialogue about all of these themes in the political economy of the
2000’s world, not just societal but also within the art world.
Theorist Stephen Wright describes the interventionist as an ontological
secret agent who is forced to don multiple identities: artist/activist,
theorist/practitioner, participant/viewer, organizer/organized.[3] No doubt the interventionist
curator will find such ontological fabrication indispensable.
The work is often pasted upon walls, or interacts, outside the gallery. It needs the passer-by audience to exist; the ephemeral outlet mirrors its situation exactly. The illegal action of postering then becomes much like the territorialization question of space. Who owns it?
And ultimately how can the interaction with this idea of ‘the production of space’ lead to revolutionary actions?
[1] ‘Instead of
causing us to remember the past like the old monuments [architecture], the new
monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.….Both past and future are
placed into an objective present.… it [architecture] is going nowhere.’ – unpublished
Writings in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam,
published University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 2nd Edition
1996
[2] Neuwirth, Robert. Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters A New Urban World, Taylor & Francis Group, New York, 2006
[3] Stephen Wright,
unpublished paper presented at the Townhouse Gallery, Cairo Egypt, December 13,
2005.
Statement wrote in april 2009