artist – Dear Earth

Shorditch arts club Ndoho Ange, Who’s Fear Death,

Animation, Art, Art films, Culture, Dance, Featured, Installation, Music

Who’s Fear Death by Ndoho Ange at Shoreditch Arts Club

Shoreditch Arts Club is pleased to announce Ndoho Ange as the recipient of their Summer Moving Image Commission. Ndoho Ange, a dancer, and visual artist, has produced an exciting new work titled Who’s Fear Death for the club’s unique screens to be exhibited for the summer season. For the launch event, she is collaborating with London-based artist and multi-instrumentalist Kim Khan to present a collaborative performance, featuring dance, spoken word, and live music.

Curated by Ruth Waters and Tony Tremlett, the exhibition ( 1 June to 6 September 2023) focuses on Ndoho’s depictions of rebirth through memory and personal storytelling. By way of dance and video, Ndoho subverts traditional notions of death as an ending, instead seeing it as a beginning – a portal to transformation and “renaissance”.

“ I experience my own death through movements.”

Ange’s practice explores the concept of the sacred self through the lens of digital aesthetics. It takes various forms, including live performances, photography, and video. Her creative journey is centred on exploring dreams, trance, consciousness, and identity from within. Performances and music that inform the videos are also very ritualistic and personal, imbued with meaning and symbolism drawn from the dance and rituals of her Guadeloupe heritage. Her aesthetic combines digital and ancestral rites, creating a perpetual reboot or loop, while her visual art centres around movement, specifically the transformation of the self, reminiscent of a dream where everything is both familiar and unknown.

Ndoho Ange, image courtesy of the artist.

“Ndoho Ange’s exhibition “Who’s Fear Death” takes us into her own notions of “death”; watery, soft and tenacious. Death exists as a transient state the artist has experienced numerous times prior to her final moment and that generate a renewed sense of birth each time around. Amongst the various screens and spaces at Shoreditch Arts Club visitors will experience the memories and stories that Ange has collected throughout this journey.

For the artist, death is an aperture towards the unknown that is both intriguing and disturbing. An encounter with death transforms her understandings of fear, confusion, pain, joy and dreams into movements that she trusts; a form of ritualistic practice that connects her with her ancestors as well as the spiritual beings that exist between dimensions.

The images Ange creates are the oceanic plants that need earth and water. They evolve slowly and painfully. These images thus live as bodies instead of surfaces. They come into beings through movements, flowing in repetitions that spark the nuances of novel sensation. Unraveling a wet world of watery unknowns, Ange leads us deeper into the undercurrents of her/our (collective) consciousness every time when the movement repeats itself — again and again, she dies when she moves, and when she moves, she gives birth to herself.

In this light, these bodies go through the kind of circular death that regenerates themselves through the encountering of curious eyes, ears, hands, noses, breathes, dusts… that are brought by its onlookers. Dear visitors, you are the witnesses who participate in the multiple deaths and rebirths of Ndoho Ange, on and off screen, inside out, to reveal the interiority of the artist’s reflection on the death-life entanglements that exist within.”

Featured_Rotherhithe from Wapping, 1946, Illustrations ©Estate of John Minton

Art, Books, Cities, Culture

John Minton’s Fascination of the East End of London

by the gentle author

Martin Salisbury author of The Snail that climbed the Eiffel Tower, a monograph of John Minton’s graphic work, explores Minton’s fascination with the East End.

Minton photo - Illustrations ©Estate of John Minton — Illustrations ©Estate of John Minton

Never quite accepted by the establishment during his brief, rather tragic life, artist John Minton (1917—1957) has divided opinion ever since. Brilliant illustrator, inspirational teacher, prodigious habitué of Soho and Fitzrovia drinking establishments, Minton was bound to enter the folklore of post-war London. Somehow, he embodied the mood of elegiac romanticism that pervaded the arts through the forties and into the early fifties before fizzling out to be replaced by a more forward-looking, assertive art in the form of American abstract expressionism and British ‘kitchen-sink’ realism.

His life, riddled as it was with contradictions, began on Christmas Day 1917 in a wooden house near Cambridge, of an architectural style that some have termed ‘Gingerbread,’ and ended just under forty years later in Chelsea. He had apparently taken his own life. More than a hundred years after his birth, Minton is finally receiving the recognition enjoyed by other mid-century greats, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious and John Piper.

Arguably, John Minton was at his best as a graphic and commercial artist, perhaps best known for his sublime illustrations for publisher John Lehmann to Elizabeth David’s highly influential food writing and Alan Ross; Corsica travel journal, Time Was Away, a lavish anti-austerity production. Yet Minton’s urban romanticism found its way into many commercial commissions too. Wartime drawings of bombed-out buildings in Poplar still exhibited the samr overwrought theatricality that was a feature of his work while under the spell of friend and fellow artist, Michael Ayrton.

In the immediate post-war years, as Minton’s work drew more consistently on direct observation, his visual vocabulary matured and his frequent visits to the river resulted in a mass of drawings of the cranes and wharves of the Port of London and Bankside. Rotherhithe from Wapping was painted in 1946 and a three-colour lithograph of the same composition followed two years later, renamed Thames-side.

The flattened perspective in this pictures embraces barges in the foreground and the jumble of warehouses on the far bank in the background. Typically, this image includes a pair of male figures in intimate conversation. Minton’s sexuality was central to his work and these dockland images embody the frustration he felt as a gay man at a time when sex between men was illegal. The many hours that Minton spent haunting the riverside allowed him not only to draw but to enjoy the company of sailors and dockers. Time and again, his pictures feature solitary male figures or distant pairs, huddled together, walking at low tide or working on boats, dwarfed by the surrounding buildings and brooding clouds.

John Minton’s only commission for London Transport came from publicity officer, Harold F. Hutchison in the form of a ‘pair poster’ titled London’s River. This concept involved posters designed in adjoining pairs, with one side featuring a striking pictorial image and the other containing text. The familiar dockland images are reworked here in gouache, in similar manner to the series of paintings commissioned for Lilliput in July 1947, London River.

An unpublished rough cover design for The Leader magazine executed in 1948 features another of Minton’s favourite motifs, the elevated street view. In this instance, the foreground figure gazing from an upper window bears more than a passing resemblance to the artist himself. The composition takes us beyond the streets below to the Thames via the dome of St Paul’s. A similar view, this time of the author’s native Hackney, graces the dust jacket of Roland Camberton’s Rain on the Pavements, published in 1951 by John Lehmann. This was the second of Camberton’s two novels, both with dust jackets designed by Minton, and tells the story of David Hirsch’s early years growing up in Hackney Jewish society.

In his 2008 article Man in a MacIntosh, Iain Sinclair followed in the footsteps of a fellow Hackney writer, recognising, “Camberton, in choosing to set ‘Rain on the Pavements’ in Hackney, was composing his own obituary. Blackshirt demagogues, the spectre of Oswald Mosley’s legions, stalk Ridley Rd Market while the exiled author ransacks his memory for an affectionate and exasperated account of an orthodox community in its prewar lull.”

John Minton’s magnificent jacket design draws us into that world with effortless elegance.

Rain on the Pavements, 1951 Illustrations ©Estate of John Minton

Scamp, 1950, Illustrations ©Estate of John Minton

Bomb-damaged buildings, Poplar, 1941 Illustrations ©Estate of John Minton

Rotherhithe from Wapping, 1946, Illustrations ©Estate of John Minton

London Bridge from Cannon Street Station, 1946, Illustrations ©Estate of John Minton

London’s River, Lilliput 1947 Illustrations ©Estate of John Minton

Illustrations from Flower of Cities, 1949, Illustrations ©Estate of John Minton

London’s River- Pool of London, London Transport, 1951, Illustrations ©Estate of John Minton

The Leader, 1948, Illustrations ©Estate of John Minton

Isle of Dogs from Greenwich, 1955, Illustrations ©Estate of John Minton

Words by the gentle author

Animation, Art, Art films, Augmented Reality, City, Culture, Film, Filmmaking, Nature, Projects, science, Technology, Virtual Reality

The Four Temperaments

Italian-Canadian director and video installation artist, Mario Brambilla’s contribution to this year’s exhibition, Unreal City, London’s largest augmented reality exhibition to date, is an immersive experiment of human emotion and the need to be loved.

“The Four Temperaments”, is inspired by the Greek philosopher, Galen’s theory of four distinct personalities found within humans, which Brambilla introduces at the beginning of the film as Sanguine, Choleric, Phlegmatic, and Melancholic. Each of the Four Humors is a character, denoted by a specific colour of lighting cast on Cate Blanchett, the actor playing all four roles. Within only two lines of dialogue – “I love you” and “I don’t love you” – Brambilla seeks to explore the range of drama, emotional impact and human connection a limited set of dialogue can be imbued with.

The short film is a companion piece to the video installation made for Unreal City, and presents the Four Humors in a quadriptych, highlighting the subtleties of layered emotion Blanchett expresses within the limited but powerful dialogue. As the film progresses, repetition and the layering of voices creates an emotional dimension in hopes of exploring the various ways in which personal struggle, needs and desires shape the way we love and use the promise of love to impact others.

The installation itself is available for everyone to view through the Acute Art app, which breaks the conventional format of the screen and occupies the space around the viewer by placing Blanchett’s Four Humors into floating coloured crystal balls. Blanchett looks the viewer in eye as the installation unfolds, engaging directly in the emotional impact of words and establishing an intrinsic human connection. With this, the viewer becomes an active participant within the unfolding drama. Brambilla’s use the medium of augmented reality develops a mode of storytelling where the observer becomes a contributor, arising new questions of how we create and consume visual art and for whom.

3D Printing, Art, Change, Culture, Dance, Music, Technology, Virtual Reality

The Rules Do Not Apply: New Commissions by Digital Artists

National Gallery X and Royal Opera House Audience Labs unveil three new commissions from groundbreaking digital artists responding to the new realities of our rapidly changing world

National Gallery X and The Royal Opera House’s Audience Labs, are delighted to announce The Rules Do Not Apply: three ambitious, boundary stretching digital artworks by talented new artists, Dennis Osadebe, a Nigerian mixed-media artist best known for his contemporary vibrant post-pop style; Fantasia Malware, a collective that makes fantastical, magical, corrupt, chaotic software, and Maf’j Alvarez, a digital media artist and creative technologist based in Brighton who creates collaborative and interactive immersive artworks, that seek to challenge existing power structures. The three artworks have just launched online

Inspired by the immense uncertainty and flux that is now a feature of our daily lives, National Gallery X, which is dedicated to exploring how technology can transform cultural experiences, and Audience Labs, the Royal Opera House artist-led innovation programme, were keen to investigate how the Covid pandemic could also provide a catalyst for reflection and change. They challenged artists to come up with imaginative responses to our ‘new normal’ taking as their inspiration two powerful works of art that reimagine and disrupt structures of power and play with the unexpected. They are:

Eve, 2018: A piece of choreography by Kristin McNally about a female dancer emerging into a digital world, exploring how to make and remake, realising her power of creation free from the constraints of the real world.
Paula Rego, Crivelli’s Garden, 1990-91: A large-scale triptych in the National Gallery collection chosen to reflect ideas of transformation and empowerment in Eve. Rego’s painting appropriates the strict linear perspective of 15th-Century painter Carlo Crivelli’s house and garden and reimagines the space to explore the narratives of women in biblical history and folklore found in various paintings across the National Gallery.

In response to The Rules Do Not Apply, Dennis Osadebe has explored Nigerian heritage, advancing technologies, and collaboration to construct an innovative experience that invites the viewer to discover their role as both instigators and witnesses within the powerful transformation of a shifting digital scene. In his unique signature style and fascination with interior spaces, Osadebe has generated a virtual room that draws inspiration from the linear perspective of Renaissance paintings, akin to the style of Paula Rego’s Crivelli’s Garden (1990-1). The objects occupying the space also signal the influence of Rego’s historically rooted work, as we find symbolic relationships through symbols of statues, references to childhood, performance, and mythology.

Fantasia Malware responded to the brief with their work The Life of Saint Fiona Bianco Xena, which tells the hotly disputed story of the fictitious saint’s life. Multiple interpretations of key moments in Saint Fiona’s life are presented in a hyper-chromatic, unholy panorama – a maelstrom of figures, stories and symbols occurring on different timelines, dimensions and scales. An elderly woman with red painted cheeks cradles a wounded child tenderly to her breast, mother of the motherless. A crystal-eyed robot holds a bouquet of roses, a cigarette hanging roughly from her lips. A thick-thighed girl with a long green braid kicks and pirouettes, taking impossible leaps in the night sky. Saint Fiona is a kaleidoscopic vision of one woman seen through three rotating eyes, an illusion of separated light scattering in different directions. The work is a comment on how the stories of women in the public eye are retold, twisted, mutated and used as a projection screen for the exorcising of current social and cultural demons.

Maf’j Alvarez imagines entering a surrealist painting using VR in her piece Eva Quantica, a dreamlike bubble of lockdown Brighton as an open world to explore the various simultaneous selves of Eve. Hands for hills, a cupcake pavilion, platforms, statues, depictions of people and the glowing lifeforce surging through everything. Maf’j’s piece is about female power, patriarchy, immigration, tradition and obligation. She explores technology as an agent of power for women and its consequences and wants to challenge the rules that always apply. The commission is experimental and explores embodiment with motion capture, she says “My ability to be creatively, financially and technologically independent is both liberating and frightening due to the obligation like Eve, to do something with it that is meaningful and impactful whilst nourishing and protecting myself and my family.”

Annette Mees, Audience Labs, The Royal Opera House says, “we are really excited about the possibilities of this commission, we have two very different starting points with Eve and Rego’s Crivelli’s Garden, both of which have emerged from a long artistic tradition. To see them being re-invented by three vastly different contemporary artists, three very different points of view, it’s thrilling, this is new art.

Lawrence Chiles, Head of Digital Services at the National Gallery, says, “the collaboration between the Royal Opera House’s Audience Labs and National Gallery X came about as a response to the times, where there was a greater need and appetite for digital culture. The Rules Do Not Apply commission is a powerful illustration of how NGX is alive and open to new artistic possibilities”.

Act Now, Art, Art films, Augmented Reality, Avatar, Biotechnology, Cities, City, Climate, Climate Emergency, Community, Culture, Design, Filmmaking, Future, Materials, Music, Nature, News, science, Sound, Sustainability, Virtual Reality, Wellness

Festival of New Cinema, Digital Culture and Art

Abandon Normal Devices Festival, the UK’s only roaming digital festival, resurfaces in 2021 with a new hybrid format, exploring the post-industrial landscapes of the Manchester Ship Canal and River Mersey. The nomadic festival of digital culture, art and film returns for an expanded summer edition over seven weeks from 27 May – 11 July 2021, online and at sites in Merseyside and Cheshire (UK).

AND Festival 2021 will bring you on an extraordinary journey responding to the Manchester Ship Canal and River Mersey, streaming via waterways and cables lying deep beneath the waves. Following the flows of shipping, energy and political power structures, from container ports on our doorsteps to the depths of the ocean floor; through ecosystems bound up with industrial chemicals, minerals and microplastics, to their effects on our planet, human and non-human bodies.

Ever migrating, adapting and evolving, AND Festival will take place online, on docklands and on the water in 2021. This ambitious programme will feature in-real-life field trips via augmented reality seascapes, immersive voyages and floating laboratories, expanded through an online programme of radical and disruptive artworks, film screenings, performances, talks and workshops. AND Festival returns in a renewed experimental, cross-platform format from 27 May 2021 for seven weeks.

AND Festival 2021 invites radical artists, critical thinkers and curious audiences to renavigate the industrial landscape from physical and virtual perspectives. Exploring the global trade gateway of the Manchester Ship Canal and River Mersey, the programme will bring into focus the oceanic scale of networked industries and infrastructures – largely hidden from sight – that form part of our daily contemporary consumption. Audiences local and remote are invited to trace the entangled flows of shipping routes, oil refineries, chemical industries, recycling plants and energy systems from these ports, and unearth the impact on our ways of living.

In a unique year when the Covid-19 pandemic swept the globe, we have witnessed far-reaching adaptations to our lives; the 9th edition of AND Festival is reimagined for a world beyond this stasis, adapted from the postponed 2020 festival into an experimental programme traversing physical and digital worlds.

For 2021, AND is pleased to reveal five new commissions with international artists and partners:

The Blue Violet River – Anita Fontaine

Step aboard the iconic Mersey Ferry to inhabit a fantasy-fiction world exploring an evolved reality brought about by climate change, rising sea levels and tropical climates. Psychedelic audio-visual sculptures explode from land and water, and the Mersey skyline playfully shapeshifts revealing a surreal alternate reality of the urban landscape in this augmented reality (AR) work, which playfully envisions a peaceful future vision of evolved humanity. From the river’s intercontinental trade to the regular blooms of moon jellyfish drawn in by tidal currents, our post-industrial perspective of the River Mersey warps in this future-forward techno fantasy.

WetLab – public works + Assembly

This floating laboratory, using the canal network as a site as well as a subject, will create an opportunity for discussion and exploration, serving as a spark to imagine future uses of living on and around water. Sited at National Waterways Museum, WetLab will host playful experiments, workshops and cross-disciplinary discussions.

The canal-based pavilion, designed by critical design practice public works, will tour sites across Greater Manchester and Lancashire after launching in Cheshire for AND Festival 2021, becoming a hub for innovative learning, discussion, and engagement on the waterways

Toxicity’s Reach – Mary Maggic, Dr Luiza Prado and Sissel Marie Tonn

From microplastics to pharmaceuticals and fertilizers, chemical cocktails contaminate waterways, eroding environmental and public health. When we cook our meals, wash our clothes, empty our sinks, drink water and use beauty products, we contribute to polluted ecosystems. As humans, we are entangled with the very environments we seek to live with, from and in.

Through three newly commissioned online artworks by artists, Mary Maggic, Dr Luiza Prado, and Sissel Marie Tonn, and an accompanying body of research, online exhibition Toxicity’s Reach radically traces some of the ways in which contaminants affect our lives in unexpected ways. How might a reimagination of toxic worlds make us think differently about our daily actions and envision other ways of being?

By The Sound of Things – Kate Davies

By the Sounds of Things is an immersive audiovisual experience onboard the unique steam-powered, Mersey-built boat, The Daniel Adamson (The Danny). From the deck of one of the last surviving Manchester Ship Canal tugs, the audience is invited to feel the vast echoes and epic scale of the modern shipping industry and consider the extent and impact of our insatiable consumerism on local and global environments. This hypnotic binaural sound work tells the story of the journey of a container as it travels from the surface to the bottom of the ocean, whilst an accompanying film focusing on the world above water presents a collision of the extraordinary and the banal that defines the image of global sea trade – an absurd narrative of ordinary things.

One-Fifth Of The Earth’s Surface – Hakeem Adam and Maxwell Mutanda

A conversation between artists Hakeem Adam, Maxwell Mutanda and the Atlantic Ocean, One-Fifth of the Earth’s Surface is presented as an interactive audio-visual landscape and explorative online experience that unearths the power of water as a dynamic and fluid archive.

The project offers multiple readings of the unpredictable transatlantic waters as an evolving structure that initiates change on its surrounding lands, rerouting power and reshaping the lives of all who depend on it. This web-based artwork serves as an experimental route for users to read various digital drawings each offering and responding to a specific theme connected to the Atlantic Ocean, a body of water covering one-fifth of the Earth’s surface.

Hakeem Adam. Image ©Street Level Photoworks

Artists presenting work in the festival include: Hakeem Adam (GH), Assembly (UK), Marija Bozinovska Jones (MK), Kate Davies (UK), Anita Fontaine (AU), Mary Maggic (CN/US), Maxwell Mutanda (ZW), New Emergences (NL), Ignatia Nilam Agusta (ID), Dr Luiza Prado (BR), public works (UK) and Sissel Marie Tonn (DK), plus more to be announced.

AND Director Ruth McCullough says:

“This edition of AND Festival emerges with a renewed vision and format for connection in our altered world. We’re excited to explore this extraordinary post-industrial landscape with artists and audiences locally and across the globe, making a space for radical reflection and urgent debate around our global ecosystems. Abandon your normal devices and join us on this journey.”

AND Creative Director Luke Moody says:

“After a year of navigating shifting horizons, this May AND will open a virtual portal to a festival that traces the scars of an industrial past with magical mirrors of the present and portals to possible futures. How do we experience art in a unique place without the possibility of bodily presence? How do we connect to a landscape and a community without being there? The art of unknowing is something we embrace as a festival and with our audiences; to try and fail, to experiment and unlearn, share and question.”

Abandon Normal Devices Festival, Manchester Ship Canal and River Mersey Thu 27 May – Sun 11 July 2021

Further details on the programme will be released over the coming months. Visit andfestival.org.uk/signup and sign up to AND e-news for programme announcements.

Architecture, City, Competition, News, Photography

Mass Virtual Gallery

London-based architectural photographers Mass Collective are hosting a virtual gallery throughout June, presenting a new exhibition each week themed around the contemporary British built environment.

The virtual gallery will be hosted on the free to use Mozilla Hubs platform as part of the London Festival of Architecture (LFA) digital programme, and at 6PM BST on every Thursday throughout the month, live artist talks will be held in the virtual gallery space and streamed to Youtube via architectural photography festival Zoomed In. Viewers will also be able to buy both limited edition and affordable print products of some of the exhibited images via the Mass Collective website.

Mass Collective was founded by photographers Francesco Russo and Henry Woide in 2019 as a social space for architectural photographers in London.

Exhibition Schedule, 4th-30th June

Exhibition openings with live artist talks throughout the month will require booking due to limited capacity, free tickets available here

4th-10th June: Above and Below

Stefania Miravalle and Will Scott look at London from the two perspectives of above and below ground level. Miravalle’s ‘Interactions’ portrays urban density through abstractions of where buildings meet in shadows and reflections, and Scott’s ‘The Architecture of the Underground’ documents the iconic designs of London Underground stations through an architectural lens.

11th-17th June: Urban Identities

Francesco Russo and Polly Tootal document the architectural quirks of the English townscape. Russo’s ‘Ruin or Rust’ documents the last remaining gas holders within the context of the towns that they tower over, and Tootal’s ‘Somewhere in England’ finds beauty in the universal obscure and mundane found across English towns.

Somewhere in England Photo ©Polly Tootal

Leigh Road Gas Holder, Ruin-or-Rust Photo ©Francesco-Russo

18th-24th June: Constructed Landscapes

Henry Woide and Luke O’Donovan reflect upon the battles between forms of nature and industry in shaping the British landscape. Woide’s ‘No Moor’ captures the obsolete industrial structures of Dartmoor as they are reclaimed by nature, whilst O’Donovan records the cultural significance of the final few coal power stations that are still standing in ‘Last Days of Coal’.

25th-30th June: Passenger

Agnese Sanvito and Matthew White present views of British architecture through transit. Sanvito’s ‘Multi-storey’ photographically surveys the ubiquitous typology of car parks, and White’s ‘Every Building on the Old Kent Road’ collects views from the back of a truck from all the way along the 1.8 miles of the famous South London road.

Every Building on the Old Kent Road. Photo ©Matthew White

3D Printing, Culture, Design, Design Talk, Future, Graphic Design, Podcast, Sustainability, Talks, Technology

HUSH Launches HUSH+1

As the latest in a series of thoughtful projects exploring the nature of inspiration and creativity, experience design firm HUSH launches HUSH+1, a podcast “for makers, by makers.” The podcast is an insider’s look, delivering open and honest dialogue between creatives across a variety of industries.

Born out of HUSH’s weekly, internal speaker series, Creative Jam, the HUSH+1 podcast is a biweekly platform for creativity, both in and outside of the design industry. The episodes host leaders from all creative walks of life — design, art, technology, architecture, fashion, engineering, fabrication, psychology, music, urban planning, and more — to discuss what they do, why they do it, and what motivates them.

HUSH’s work has always focused on inspiring reflection and creating a compelling participatory experience, and HUSH+1 is no different. “Design is by nature, a process of shaping some outside force, curating information, and giving form to something extrinsic,” explains HUSH Founding Partner David Schwarz. “So, HUSH+1 guests are intentionally from outside of our exact world – they are tangential forces, thinking about similar subject matter, but through a different lens. They are the +1.”

It launched with guests such as scientific research-based artist Ani Liu, artist and technologist Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Mark Kleback of Brooklyn’s indie game arcade Wonderville, and light sculptor Jason Krugman. Each conversation is a refreshing, maker-focused talk that doesn’t eschew the technical and creative details, but rather focuses on the individual’s steps along their creative path.

Art films, Climate, Climate Emergency, Documentary, Film, Filmmaking, Nature, science, Sound, Sustainability

Time Bascule

Listen to a talk that features music from a new film ( out soon ) Design Exchange has been working on with Artist Di Mainstone listen on Reform Radio

The Great Mother Earth Show 23rd April 2020! Over the hour IORA and Mandy Wigby share music inspired by the world around them, hear from specialists in conservation to help us all cope with eco-anxiety. They speak to a member of the Extinction Rebellion movement and hear from artists about the ways they are responding to climate change through their work! Still from the film ‘Time Bascule’ by artist Di Mainstone, commissioned by Tower Bridge in celebration of their 125th Anniversary.

https://www.reformradio.co.uk/play/MXR9qfgvfp4F5Zg6X?escaped_fragment=1

Act Now, Architecture, Change, Culture, Design, Future, Installation, News, Sustainability, Wellness

Delvendahl Martin Architects designs low-waste exhibition for Eco-Visionaries show at the Royal Academy of Arts

Delvendahl Martin were appointed to design the exhibition for Eco-Visionaries (open until 23 February 2020) at the Royal Academy of Arts, which has been jointly curated by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, Architecture Programme Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, Pedro Gadanho, architect, curator and author, and Mariana Pestana, architect, curator and co-founder, The Decorators.

RA Eco-Visionaries, Photo ©Agnese Sanvito — RA Eco-Visionaries. *Image:* Rimini Protokoll, Win > < Win, 2017
Photo ©Agnese Sanvito

Eco-Visionaries examines humankind’s ecological impact on the planet and brings together artists, designers and architects from across the globe who are confronting these environmental issues through their practice.

At this critical moment in the history of the planet, the exhibition will present innovative works that reconsider the relationship between humans and nature and offer alternative visions for the future.

The exhibition features works by 21 international practitioners in a wide range of media, including film, sculpture, immersive installation, architectural models and full-scale prototypes, all interrogating how art and architecture can help us respond to a rapidly changing world. Highlights include works by Unknown Fields ( featured in Design Exchange #FutureForecast edition in print and also featured online here), the artist collective Rimini Protokoll. Their immersive installation, Win > < Win (2017), explores ecological empathy by confronting audiences with live jellyfish, a species actually benefitting from the effects of global warming. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s new project, The Substitute (2019), draws upon archival footage in conjunction with experimental data to enable visitors to come face-to-face with a life-size digital reproduction of a northern white rhinoceros. The last male of the subspecies died in 2018. These provocative responses are a wake-up call, urging us to acknowledge and become conscious of our impact on our environment.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5sFCA8hZRy/

Other Participants in the exhibition include: HeHe, Ana Vaz and Tristan Bera, Tue Greenfort, Carolina Caycedo, Nerea Calvillo / In the Air, Olafur Eliasson Hon RA, Virgil Abloh, Pinar Yoldas, Basim Magdy, Dunne & Raby, New-Territories (S/he), Ant Farm Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation Futurefarmers, Philippe Rahm Architectes, Studio Malka Architecture, WORKac, SKREI

“Eco-Visionaries has offered an opportunity to critically reflect on this culture and mind-set surrounding the delivery of exhibitions in terms of sustainability. The approach was therefore to build little from scratch, making use of existing resources and reclaimed materials as much as possible. Free-standing plinths and furniture have been borrowed and salvaged from recent and past exhibitions.“

“The caption ledges throughout have been designed to be fabricated with recycled wood and board material, using up offcuts to minimise waste and providing a resource that can be used for future exhibitions. In the design of the partition screens, which are made from promotional banners from previous exhibitions, we have explored the re-use of an available resource to produce something altogether new.”

The technical and fabric solutions for the structure have been developed in collaboration with textile designer and upcycling expert, Barley Massey, to produce an intervention which is modular, efficient and cost effective – for which a life beyond this exhibition is envisaged. Elsewhere, single-use plastics are being avoided altogether, instead using sustainable materials that are chosen for their low environmental impact, such as plywood, paper and card, recycled wherever possible.

Delvendahl Martin worked in collaboration with Daly & Lyon, who developed the graphics strategy, to ensure that these aims extended throughout every aspect of the design. The use of vinyl is avoided completely, instead, introductory texts are printed direct to surface, using vegetable based inks, onto boards made from recycled cellulose fibres. Caption labels are made from recycled post-consumer waste and simply placed onto the graphics ledges in order to minimise the use of adhesives. Scale was determined by standard sizes so as to eliminate wastage, and information was reduced to the essential only, thereby minimising printing and ink usage. Fundamentally, the aim throughout is to reduce process, material demand, carbon footprint and waste, by proposing an efficient design which relies on a few carefully placed interventions to organise the space.

Delvendahl Martin has established a solid track record designing exhibitions and gallery spaces. Projects in this field include the exhibition design for 2014 Gwangju Biennale, The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern, Andreas Gursky and Diane Arbus, both at the Hayward Gallery in London.

The practice has recently worked alongside curator Ralph Rugoff on the exhibition design for the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, which opened in May this year. Work in this field has illuminated for the practice the potential wastefulness of the exhibition industry and the way in which high-quality bespoke interventions, which are constructed from scratch, often have no life beyond the exhibition and are disposed of.

The practice, therefore, is increasingly working to implement an approach which brings sustainability to the forefront of the design process and delivery, for example through the use of locally sourced plywood at the Venice Biennale, a material that, unlike plasterboard, can be easily recycled and re-used following exhibition takedown.

Visual artist and Harlesden-based barber Faisal Abdu’Allah attends the unveiling of his winning entry (‘The Park Royals’) for the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC) Annual Art Commission

Art, Community, Culture, Installation, News

New public artwork inspired by Windrush generation unveiled in London

OPDC’s Annual Art Commission photo-tapestries celebrate London’s largest and most vibrant industrial area, Park Royal

Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC) recently unveiled the winning entry of its Annual Art Commission, The Park Royals by visual artist and Harlesden-based barber Faisal Abdu’Allah.

In the form of two large jacquard woven photo-tapestries, reworked from a series of photographs of 22 residents and workers from Park Royal, the artwork intricately weaves together the lives, stories and struggles of two generations who make up the area’s industrial heart.

Park Royal, located in northwest London, is today home to a thriving community of makers and creators, supporting around 43,000 jobs and supplying one-third of all food consumed in the capital.

Born and bred in Park Royal, Faisal is a descendant of the Windrush generation. He studied art at Central St Martins and the Royal College of Art, and his work has been exhibited internationally.

Now officially on display at Brent Civic Centre, The Park Royals, produced by Create London and created in collaboration with the local community, pays homage to London’s diversity as we mark Black History Month and paves the way for Brent’s year as London Borough of Culture in 2020.

Commenting on the unveiling of his artwork, Faisal said: “It’s an honour to be chosen for the OPDC Annual Art Commission. My aim with The Park Royals was to pay homage to the Windrush generation, who were integral to creating the community where I grew up and making it the great place it is today. Working with local people was really important to me and helped with the process of creating the artwork, making sure that it was their stories that were embodied in the work.

“I’d like to thank everyone who has been involved in The Park Royals and for the support of OPDC and hope that Londoners come to see the community’s work for themselves.”

Loleta Cameron, pictured in The Park Royals, added: “Faisal embodies the talent and creativity of young people in Brent and continues to champion and support the success of local people. I am incredibly proud to be both a part of this project and the community of Harlesden and Park Royal.”

Deputy Mayor for Culture and the Creative Industries, Justine Simons OBE, said:“Faisal Abdu’Allah’s work is a real celebration of Park Royal and a fitting winner of OPDC’s art commission. London’s diversity is our strength and this artwork tells our story brilliantly. I’m delighted that it’s on display ahead of Brent’s year as our London Borough of Culture.”

Liz Peace, Chairman of OPDC, commented: “Local communities are at the heart of Old Oak and Park Royal’s regeneration and are integral to shaping its future. We are delighted to unveil Faisal’s artwork, which brilliantly captures the area’s rich heritage and diversity.

“Through the Annual Art Commission, we are showcasing the depth and breadth of artistic talent that exists, helping aspiring artists to have a platform. We were impressed with the high calibre of entries received and hope that the scheme continues to inspire artists and communities to engage with this once-in-a-lifetime regeneration opportunity for London.”

The Annual Art Commission is a flagship project of OPDC’s Great Place Scheme, an ambitious three-year cultural programme being delivered with local people, businesses and organisations in Old Oak and Park Royal. The programme aims to uncover, connect and showcase the culture, creativity and heritage of London’s largest and most vibrant industrial area, Park Royal.

Funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Great Place Scheme is delivering £1.5 million worth of community-led art, culture and heritage activities across Old Oak and Park Royal.

The Old Oak and Park Royal development are one of the largest regeneration opportunities in Europe, transforming an area of brownfield land three times the size of Canary Wharf into a new sustainable and inclusive community. Engagement through art is another way of encouraging the local community to help shape future regeneration plans for the area.

Faisal’s artwork will be on public display at Brent Civic Centre from until the new year.