Just when I thought I’d found the perfect writer for my ‘Special Attention’ publication, there was an email from Michael Uwemedimo saying that he regretted having to cancel but that he was locked in a car-boot somewhere in England as part of a Hostile Environments Training which his subsidy-givers have insisted he take before returning to his filming in the depths of the Niger Delta and therefore wasn’t able to write… (Still, perhaps he will find a way to collaborate on the wider ‘Special Attention’ project when he’s escaped his kidnappers…)
Anyway, in my ensuing panic (the deadline is hurtling towards me at breakneck speed) I mailed the first names relating to the relevant topics that I could think of and, amazingly, Loïc Wacquant has offered to collaborate by allowing me to use texts excerpted from his writings (on incarceration, the penal state, race as a principle of social vision and division etc).
Plus today, Rob van Kranenburg is going to write a piece centred around the photos of the abandoned police station – incorporating his work on biometrics and his rant ‘The end of the Netherlands in twelve steps’.
So politically the project is in really good hands!
Now just need someone to write something relating to the art side of the project, but now I don’t need them to deal with the other socio-political issues that ought to work out. Meanwhile, big grin on my face about the way this is going, and I have to get back to reading my way through Loïc’s books…
Here’s a short clip from an ongoing project – the story of Adam and Eve, as told by my homeless collaborator, Barbara.
(It takes a minute or so to load, particularly if your computer is as turgid as mine!)
You can see the complete, 6minute film on the The Way It Is page.
Thinking about ‘tools’ which I use to work with, for the (Un)Solicited Advice brief – manifestaplatform, and notice embedded in this clip a number of key elements, perhaps not tools as such that I might apply them consciously, but things such as a sense of inclusion/ exclusion, feminism, humour, story-telling/language, which feed my work through a kind of informed intuition.
For more of Barbara see GODSEND
‘The Guide’ issue of Volume magazine – #22, December 2009 – has a section entitled Atlas of Love and Hate, on the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency.
There are 4 pages dedicated to my work – diary excerpts from the days leading up to the interventions on burned out houses, plus photographs.
And Lado Darakhvelidze’s ‘Future Postman’ project is in there too.
The Platform for (Un)Solicited Research and Advice is a project attached to the Manifesta Biennial which I’m involved with through the Dutch Art Institute. Each month there’s a specific aspect related to biennials which is being addressed. Last month, relating to the question of personal attitude as an artist toward the biennial phenomenon, I made this sketch…
Several pieces of my ceramic roadkill can be seen in the exhibition ‘la maison de poupee’ curated by Suze May Sho in the Historisch Museum in Arnhem (NL) as part of the 2009 Fashion Bienial – runs until 16/08/2009e
- John Berger enunciates the possibility for art to run
“like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour.”
As an artist, I feel the need to offer resistance to ‘life’s brutalities’, and although ‘activist art’ is not a new phenomenon, there is something about the times we are living through whereby I feel that a certain urgency has made the combination art and activism more necessary.
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