Drawing on the City
A collaborative work by Catherine du Toit and Peter Thomas of 51% studios with artist Hannah Collins.
‘Drawing on the City – A walk through history’ is an architectural and sculptural project of seven installations conceived as a route through the changing landscape of Barcelona and St Adria. The route and installations make visible again the cultural heritage and experiences of the people of Barcelona, which has sometimes been overlaid, sometimes forgotten, sometimes displaced …
The new structures embed collective memory and imagery in the cityscape, bringing a continuous and present sense of history to the city by pointing to the real and developing landscape it contains.
Along the route visitors and local residents are able to see and understand the cityscape, becoming aware of essential historical structures and newly developing urban plans.
The work is an active and engaging series of dialogues around the role of the city in the making of communities and individual experience. A positive role is created for both the sculptural scenarios and the audience/participants.
Drawing on the City was exhibited in the Caixa Forum during the summer of 2008. For more information, please see Hannah Collins’ website.
The House of Doors sits at a meeting place between the land and the sea, and makes reference to the sea as a first point of contact for many of the cities early migrants. Floating pale like a ghost, from the moment the first light illuminates the sea to the lower light of the evening, the House of Doors evokes two distinct moments in time: a memory of using doors to build his house in 1962 recounted by a former resident of Somorrostro and a photograph of a home built from 16 wooden doors, taken by Hannah Collins in 2003. The small pontoon tempts swimmers out to use it as a meeting place. For those not swimming it provides a resonant image seen from the shore.
The Portal is the site of the intersection between Cerda’s diagonal, the Tramvia and Avinguda Litoral. It is also a node in a series of walkable and cycable loops linking Barcelona, Barceloneta and Poble Nou with San Adria and Badalona. The portal is an orientation map for the overall project, an extension of the tram platform worked in coloured enamels with each of the seven installations colour coded and linked into the fabric of the city. The portal entices you to explore the neighbourhood, to venture deeper…
In San Adria,at a thriving Tuesday market below the freeway local bird keepers meet to compare, exchange or trade their birds. The Singing bird wall is set in a quiet spot under trees near one of the entrances to the market.
The diverse areas around la Mina were, until recently, home to many horses, kept in backyards and on a horse farm on waste ground. Horses formed an integral way of life in the area and were used to pull recycling carts, for transport and for trade. Recent changes have seen the horses disappear. A place of horses is a happening/event that sees the horses return to la Mina, and is inspired by the work of Muybridge and Asger Jorn at Albisola. A series of identical concrete panels will bear the immaculate detailed evidence of a horse-run through specially prepared troughs on the rivers edge. Once dry they will be tilted and lifted into position on the adjacent retaining wall to form a permanent sculpture.
During the Summer the ground surface of Paseo Cameron is covered in the extraordinary drawing of the children of la Mina. By night-time often the whole plaza of over 200 metres is covered by drawings which are replaced by renewed activity the next day as the drawings fade and are walked off the Plaza. The Wall of Dreams is located in a local cultural centre. It is made from ceramic tiles, various shades of gold in colour which carry imprints of the childrens’ chalk drawings.
Pavilion is a collection of green structures dedicated to providing a series of amenities within the park. It is sited on the raised ground beneath the trees to create a series of discreet spaces which can be open to the sky, shaded by the tree canopy in summer, or in the winter sun.
Social Cinema
Frieze Magazine asked critics and curators from around the world to choose what, and who, they felt to be the most significant shows and artists of 2006: Alex Farquharson wrote: “‘Social Cinema’ was as memorable as it was fugitive. Over three evenings they created outdoor cinemas that made for delicious juxtapositions between London landmarks – Berthold Lubetkin’s Finsbury Health Centre and Norman Foster’s Millennium Bridge – and films related to Modernist thinking on architecture, urbanism and social progress in postwar Britain.”
In 2006, as part of the London Architecture Biennale, we collaborated with artists Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska on Social Cinema: a project consisting of a series of temporary cinemas, each installed for one night only into the existing urban fabric of the Biennale designated route between Exmouth Market and the Millennium Bridge.
Films about, set in, or commenting on London and its architecture were stunningly projected upon the city itself. At each location, buildings became screens, steps seating, and owners of nearby buildings generously gave power, or loaned their houses as projection booths. The architectural fabric of the temporary cinemas was improvisory, playful and subtle; pallets ‘borrowed’ from a Smithfield Market made temporary bleachers, plastic crates from local pubs and restaurants became seating, neighbours joined the audience, and volunteers with torches acted as ushers.
Social Cinema turned un-built spaces into auditoria and spectacularly intervened in neglected places around landmark buildings. The film programme of the Social Cinema traced an evolution in the representation of everyday life. Each program began by introducing ideas and observations on London and its buildings with excerpts from lectures in the Architectural Association Archives, including contributions from the architects Cedric Price, Denys Lasdun, Reyner Banham, and Ron Herron; and then looped back to the 1960’s showing some magnificent films from the Free Cinema movement, of everyday working class experience. Free Cinema was followed by a selection of extraordinary amateur films from Straight 8 and these segued into short films previously uploaded onto internet sites where skateboarders, shoppers, and tourists record their interactions with the architecture of the city.
For a detailed film listings please go to the artists’ website: Chanceprojects / the Photographers’ Gallery
None of this possible without Sam Collins or James Lingwood. Thanks also to Malcolm at XL video and Simon Fryer at Cover-it-up.
Enthusiasm
“One of the year’s most intriguing exhibitions is a set of amateur films produced in Communist Polish factories. Re-presented at the Whitechapel by Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, the films were bankrolled by soviet bureaucracy, who thought they were funding sturdy propaganda films. In fact, the filmmakers produced poetic, and sometimes epic works that speak of workers’ dreams of happiness, love and freedom.” The best and brightest 2005 by Niru Ratnam for Observer Magazine.
Films of love, longing and labour: At the invitation of the Whitechapel Gallery and the artists, we transformed galleries in the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Kunstwerke, and Fundacio Antoni Tapies in Barcelona into a film makers club-room, three beautiful curtained cinema spaces, and an archive lounge.
Enthusiasm investigated how the amateur, the enthusiast or the hobbyist works invisibly within the relentless flow of ‘official’ culture, frequently adopting a counter-cultural tone of tactical resistance and criticism. In Poland under socialism even leisure was organised through factory-sponsored associations, and yet these film-makers activities became a space for dreams of love, criticism and freedom.
51’s
And not forgetting Peter’s passionate obsession with the number ‘51’ – he’s been collecting them for as long as we can remember, so we begged him to share a few favourites … We’ve grouped a few here and will be adding many more over time.