The Alive Playground is a simple -both elegant and readable- intervention by Brígida Campbell in a children’s playground in Pendleton, Salford. The work was created in collaboration with IUD, and local school children who played happily and noisily in their break time whilst Brigida made sound recordings.
Young mothers who were evicted from a hostel called Focus E15 in September 2013 are occupying vacant council houses in East London. The mothers, who were told to look for accomodation on the private rental market in Manchester, Birmingham and Hastings, joined together to resist displacement and fight for “social housing not social cleansing”. The group will be holding an open meeting about the conditions of the estate (recently their water has been turned off) this Sunday 28th September.
Photographer Chris Jordan has created a powerful series of images on a remote atoll, which evidence how our everyday waste (lighters, bottle tops etc) is lethally consumed by baby albatrosses. http://www.chrisjordan.com/
Below are more resources which are helping us better observe and understand waste as a material and a productive force in our work
Since 2008 photographer and film maker Wang Jiuliang has been investigating the ring of garbage dumps that surround Beijing. (In 2013 IUD was privileged to exhibit our work alongside his in Guangdong Art Museum). This is a trailor for his film:
We have been thinking a lot about unbuilding as we observe the creative destruction of tower blocks in Salford (see the above photo by IUD on the ground). These demolitions are part of the first phase of a PFI driven gentrification project. In this process many social housing tenants are evicted and their homes replaced with houses and flats for sale on the open market. The demolition industry along with property developers, builders, finance companies and so on benefit from regeneration, which is not really about the provision of better homes but the redistibution of assets, from the poor to the rich. Demolition also functions at a symbolic level, as it rids us of unwanted architectural forms, in this case high rise social housing. The significance of this is not in some failure of the modernist architectural project but the destruction of viable homes and the displacement of the poor. Regeneration in this instance calls for the replacement of unwanted bodies with the healthy bodies of the rich who have money to spend and don’t rely so heavily on council services. In her book Where the Other Half Lives, Sarah Glynn says ” ‘regeneration’ sounds as though it could be a good thing, but it is being used as a Trojan horse for state-sponsored ‘accumulation by dispossession’ on a massive scale”(page 72).
Detonation Deutschland Diptych by Piero Steinle
This is an ongoing selection of resources on unbuilding, rubble, demolition etc.
Julian Rosefeldt and Piero Steinle made a video installation from archival sequences of demolitions called Detonation Deutschland. See the diptych above and more on Piero’s Steinle’s website.
Boulevard Henri IV, Place de la Bastille, demolished section of Paris photographed by Charles Marville 1876.
Photographs made by Charles Marville of the demolition of large sections of Paris by Baron Haussmann. Marville’s work is digitized in the collection of the Musee Carnavalet (search in French only).
Artist Hilary Powell’s work is an exploration of and collaboration with demolition sites, materials and stories http://demolitionsite.net
Rubble: unearthing the history of demolition, by Jeff Byles and published by Three Rivers Press is a well researched popular history of demolition.
This is an academic paper, which explores the performative properties of asbestos in the demolition process: Inextinguishable fibres: demolition and the vital materialisms of asbestos by Nicky Gregson, Helen Watkins & Melania Calestani, published in Environment & Planning Journal 2010, volume 42.
therubbleclub.com: a club for architects whose creations have been intentionally destroyed during their life time.
10 minute promotional video of back to back demolitions by Controlled Demolition Inc
more to follow….
This is an image from Randa Mirza’s project entitled Beirutopia. A series of photographs of billboards showing new developments in Beirut, that are distressed, damaged or otherwise interrupted by the life taking place around them.
See more of Randa Mirza’s work here: http://www.randamirza.com/
Early in September IUD are presenting a paper at Neoliberalism and Everyday Life, the annual conference organised by Nicola Clewer for CAPPE, the University of Brighton. Keynote speaker for 2014 is Imogen Tyler, author of Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection & Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. Our paper is entitled All materials of value have been removed: everyday cleansing in the neoliberal housing environment.
Majia Nadesan researches political economy and biopolitics (the politics of life). Her interests are diverse but are broadly concerned with economic, social and environmental justice. She has published 4 books: Fukusima and the Privatization of Risk (Palgrave); Constructing Autism (Routledge); Governmentality, Biopower and Everyday Life (Routledge); Governing Childhood (Palgrave). Her most recent book, Fukushima and the Privatization of Risk explores the world’s worst nuclear disaster, & is the primary focus of her blog.
A public talk about her research at Orford Ness by Caitlin DeSilvey, organised by Invisible College at the Lighthouse, Glasgow on 8.9.2012. DeSilvey is a geographer whose research explores the cultural significance of material change, using visual imagery and story-telling…
Audio recording of Doreen Massey at the School of Arts, University of Northampton, November 28th 2012.
http://researchsupporthub.northampton.ac.uk/2013/02/11/on-space-in-conversation-with-doreen-massey/
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