Zone C (South/West) curator Makiko Haro has titled her zone, Urban Disaster/Catastrophe/Survival Actions. The three projects recommended below certainly make good on the theme by facilitating nebulous people-sculptures, mobile dwellings, and collective architecture. (Images and descriptions lifted from the Nuit Blanche website.) It all starts on October 3rd at 6:55pm.
FIRE AND SAUSAGE: Small Mercies, 2009
Tom Dean
Visual Art
Parking Lot at Liberty Street and Hanna Avenue
Click here to view this location on a map.
The fires and the Liberty district’s remove, the trace of the feral, suggest the aftermath of a collapse, a catastrophe or apocalypse. But what the artist is interested in is the calm after a fall, when we count our mercies and shared the surplus. An economic collapse that has returned us to essentials, warmth and food and social generosity.
FIRE AND SAUSAGE: Small Mercies is a social sculpture. It engages and arranges people. Participants congregate around a fire, a cooking station, clustered radially around food and fire. The form remains, enlarging and diminishing, a stable form centered around food and fire. All the complexity and richness and pathos of a social cluster, strangers and friends with some common purpose and focal point, a clustered audience before a spectacle and themselves a spectacle, figures joining and departing the cluster and flowing from one site to another.
After the fall, a hobo utopio. With sausage and hot chocolate by Jamie Kennedy, piano by Hank Bull, and poker by Jim Garrard.
I don’t know what a “hobo utopia” is, but I like the idea of a “social sculpture.”
Lamport Stadium Parking Lot, west side
Liberty Street, at Fraser Avenue
Click here to view this location on a map.
BICITYCLE(Bike-city) is a project about mobile life. Sakaguchi is inspired by the lifestyle, innovation and survival skills of homeless people in Japan. His research focuses on two concepts; mobility and recycling. The houses of the homeless are easy to dismantle and remake because people are forced to move their houses. They separate the infrastructures: water, gas, toilet, and electricity. The houses are made from the scraps of the city, as they understand the materials of urban waste are natural resources. Sakaguchi undertakes this concept further through incorporating used bicycles as a survival action for the city. For Nuit Blanche, the artist will create 11 mobile housing units, each attached to a bicycle. The audience can interact and relocate the works within the area.
More interactivity, this time focused on mobility and recycling.
Take Shelter, 2009
Annie Si-Wing Tung
Maggie Flynn
Meiko Maruyama
Stephanie Nicolò
Jessica Thalmann
Installation
Lamport Stadium Parking Lot, west side
Liberty Street, at Fraser Avenue
Click here to view this location on a map.
Take shelter. Build. Take apart. Rebuild. Make shelter. Recreate.
Bring a can if you can. Take a can if you need.
Canned food and cardboard boxes form the basis of this participatory installation. Using these materials, viewers are invited to pack, fold, and stack to create a shelter. Participants may take food items as needed or may bring non-perishable food items to contribute to the piece. Remaining food will go to the Fort York Food Bank. As participants add to, take from, and alter the shelter, they are implicated in a struggle for stability in a system where stability isn’t possible. The cyclical and temporal nature of this exhibition is reflective of the situation perpetuated by superficial solutions supposed to remedy issues of poverty and homelessness. In donating leftover food to a food bank, Take Shelter simultaneously participates in and problematizes one of such temporary solutions. The experience may be playful, reminiscent of building a fort with the box that the refrigerator was delivered in. But it also may be desperate: how do we create shelter when our resources don’t make sense?
Another interactive project, still referencing sustainability and homelessness (like Sakaguchi) but folding in a limitation of resources and a building experience that includes the audience.
These three projects complement each other well, all raising some combination of similar themes: mobility, domesticity, home, sustainability and reusing/recycling. And they all seem to be tackled in different, creative, critical and engaging ways.
Originally posted at: http://www.marissaneave.com
