Frieze are doing a series of
events and we were able to attend one titled ‘Can Self-Build Save Us All?’. As
you can imagine it centred around the concept of self-build and its long and
varied history. Self-building has recently been brought to centre stage: it
featured as a theme in the most recent Venice Architecture Biennale and is
proposed as an answer to housing crises all over the globe, including those
related to emergency accommodation, long-term homes and the grey area in
between. There were some superb speakers with plenty to say on the matter. Thomas
Lommee (creator of OpenStructures) said something beautiful about the idea of
how one keeps oneself invested; his answer was to exchange novelty to nuance, learning
new things can be just as interesting as learning more about the things you
already know. Another favourite moment was Daniel Charny’s presentation
regarding the question of whether fixing is the future of design. He used the term
‘fixperts’ which we not only thoroughly enjoyed but caused us to think back to
a Freakonomics Podcast on the subject maintenance and discusses why
it isn’t the enemy of innovation, but rather the saving grace of American
infrastructure. All-in-all, a thought-provoking day which made us want to build
a table, or something more useful.
Went out for a little art-viewing
venture today, over to Lisson Gallery which had two exciting shows on. The first
is Bouchra Khalili’s ‘Mapping Journey Project’ in which she employs
geographical maps as a means to reveal what generally remains hidden from our
eyes: the clandestine and illegal journeys made by migrants. There are eight
videos in the first space, all showing a hand drawing his/her course onto the
map’s surface, whilst being narrated. The people in the films are described in
the press release as ‘displaced individuals in transnational hubs’, but this
merely scrapes the horrifying surface of their crucifying situations. Many had
been jailed for huge periods of time and had been attempting to get to their
destinations for even longer. Khalili gives these
undocumented individuals a voice. By making them the main protagonists of her
videos she challenges the stereotypical representation of migrants in the
mainstream media. Important and distressing.
Heading upstairs one finds 'Lisson
Presents...', a group show of artists who engage with how narratives can be
formed and shared. A fairly poor, undescriptive title for a pretty interesting
collection of works and Ryan Gander’s ‘Associative Ghost Template # 10’ is
one of them. Its one of a series of 28 framed works from 2012 based on a
collage of research articles and images on the subject of invisibility,
illusion and artifice. It comprises two layers of
Perspex, each punctured by apertures of various shapes and sizes. Each layer of
Perspex relates to the original collage, and the laser-cut openings show the
size and location of the objects. This is a classic example of Gander
encouraging the imaginative possibilities created as the human brain struggles
to find a connection between incongruent objects.
John Latham’s piece ‘Story of
the RIO’ was another great work from the show. The 'Reflective Intuitive
Organism' and the works describe the evolution of human knowledge and culture,
beginning with a blank, white panel and ending with a complex book relief. Visible
is a sequence of 18 panels depicting the development of a complex universe
containing RIOs from a proto universe. He’s used transparent glass, his third
important medium/material, to signify an atemporal score or informing component
of events. A transparent glass panel followed by a plain white panel represents
the proto universe consisting of a state 0 followed by a state 1, or Least
Event. And the remaining panels in the sequence represent highlighted
evenometric steps. The final panel is a book relief in which a reflective
intuitive organism appears as one book cluster along with other clusters
representing a merely reflective organism and a non-reflective organism. An
incredibly complex and multifaceted work which becomes even more so the more
one learns about it.
