Whitechapel Art Gallery
We were briefed to modernize the Whitechapel’s back of house, carrying new identity into these spaces in fresh and playful ways. The desire for soft, organic materials and low embodied energy led to the sourcing of a reclaimed gymnasium floor, re-laid throughout with the original sports markings left intact.
The kitchen allows informal lunches as well as more formal staff meetings and presentations, with ‘ideas shelves’ for improvisory mini exhibitions, with pin boards and new lockers for visiting exhibition staff.
The director’s office is reconfigured to allow extra space for meetings. Large transparent sliding screens replace existing painted timber doors to optimise natural day lighting in all offices, simultaneously enhancing the sense of community between team members.
Original desking is kept, and resurfaced, overhead cabinets are re-used for storage and workstations personalised with individual roll out libraries.
Roof spaces will be insulated with locally sourced materials and relined to provide additional storage which will improve both energy efficiency and comfort levels.
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 Film Archive, 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.
To see more about each location, have a look at the portfolio page here. Detailed film listings are on the artists’ website: Chanceprojects and at 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.
Out & About
