Salford, (Re)Tracing My Roots, And the ‘New’ Urban Renewal

Architectures of Displacement – Guangzhou, China. Tate Liverpool.

In April IUD created a Temporary Research Space to showcase at the Tate Exchange, Tate Liverpool. The work examined the current transformation of Chinese housing, focusing on domestic sites in Guangzhou. Drawing on fieldwork, the research space created an interactive resource of videos, texts and photographs to handle. The work is part of IUD’s ongoing witnessing of the dispossession and displacement produced by contemporary strategies of capital accumulation centred on housing.

The showcase also featured the screening of two films: A Walk in Xian Village (2015) and Industrial Road (2015).

IUD Jane in Xian Village (2015). Photo by John van Aitken.

Working with the LOOK 17 Photography Festival, IUD also organised a number of public talks at the Tate Liverpool and the Museum of Liverpool to explore the consequential geographies produced by the unbuilding and reimagining of these domestic landscapes at home and in China.

Below are a selection of recordings from the talks given:

Pendleton Soundscape

As part of the Promising Home exhibition at The People’s History Museum  IUD have been walking with a range of people who have responded to the environment in Pendleton. Sound artist Rob Griffiths made a work based on the sonic textures of the estate.Rob Griffiths – “This is a composition made from a number of field recordings made on a single visit to Pendleton in Summer 2016. A number of the field recordings were made in the overgrown voids that were all that remained of the high rise residential buildings. The sound captured here was simultaneously natural (birds and insects) and urban with a constant, underlying droning from the nearby expressway. I then filtered and processed this underlying drone to separate it. Other field recordings were made in the nearby ‘Salford Shopping City’ shopping centre and adjacent market.”

Pendleton Soundscape Link

“I’m a sound recordist who is constantly recording and occasionally mixing the everyday environmental sounds I encounter. I’m  keenly interested in the Proustian ability of sound, unlike images, to relocate you physically and historically in the location it was captured.”

 

Conference Recordings – Art Practices & The Housing Crisis

On November 18th the Institute of Urban Dreaming (IUD) hosted a one-day symposium examining how contemporary art practices engage with the current housing crisis. The event consisted of a series of talks and round table discussions at the People’s History Museum. Below are audio recordings of the talks that took place. We hope you enjoy listening to them as much as we did taking part. IUD.

The Alive Playground

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.

 

Promising Home – The Temporary Research Space

We have been working with designer maker Tim Denton to develop a new temporary research space structure for our exhibition at the People’s History Museum. The new research structure will accomodate materials from our extensive documentation of the changes occuring to the Pendleton housing estate where we have worked on since 2004.

The structure will home a small library relating to council housing and a photographic archive detailing the physical changes to the housing and the local residential environment. Relevant donations of books and research materials to the space are welcomed.

The research space draws on a wide range of influences from Owenite Halls of Science, Soviet workers reading rooms, Lenin Corners, to the architecture of Constant and Archigram .

Former Director of the People’s History Museum Dr Nick Mansfield will be talking about the history of such worker’s educational spaces at the People’s History Museum at our late event Radicals Assemble! Demand Utopia! on January 12th 2017.

IUD Archive Imge (2016) Installation at PHM

Promising Home Conference – Art Practices & the Housing Crisis

The Institute of Urban Dreaming (IUD) is hosting a one-day conference examining how contemporary art practices engage with the current housing crisis. This is part of IUD’s public activities to explore and debate the issues central to the Promising Home exhibition at the People’s History Museum, Manchester.

The event will consist of a series of talks and round table discussions. It aims to consider the encounter between art and housing in a critical, trans-disciplinary way. It will consider housing and art practice before & beyond the current trend for socially engaged art. It will also debate the ethics and politics of practices that relate to gentrification and displacement.

IUD Archive Image – Pendleton (2015)

To book a place go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/art-practices-the-housing-crisis-conference-tickets-28807349558

Promising Home – The People’s History Museum, Manchester

From October 29th to January 13th The People’s History Museum, Manchester will host an IUD ‘temporary research space’ in its Community Gallery. The research space will make available a range of photographs and materials we’ve produced while documenting the changing state of council housing in Pendleton, Salford.

IUD Archive Image (2014)

Based in a tower block in Pendleton, we have been recording and researching the estate since 2004. The Community Gallery exhibit will highlight a wide range of images and research materials from this extended period of research that critically examines the estates recent transformation.

IUD Archive Image (2013) – Walk with Dr Simon Faulkner & David Reeb

West of the Tracks (Tie Xi Qu)

Wang Bing’s immersive nine hour documentary epic explores the changing world of China between 1999 to 2001. Set in the North-East of the country in Shenyang, his observational style records the physical and social textures of the regions heavy industry in its final stages before closure through bankruptcy.

Divided into three sections (Rust, Remnants and Rails) the documentary uses a ‘direct cinema’ approach to faithfully witness the people caught up in the massive changes to their work and homes as a consequence of reform era changes to the former planned market economy. See Jie Li’s excellent article for a further analysis of the film’s context and cinematic style West of the Tracks – Salvaging the Rubble of Utopia.

West of the Tracks (2002)

Architectures of Displacement – Salford, UK & Guangzhou, China – Temporary Research Space

IUD archive image. Close up from a council neighbourhood being cleared for private homes. Salford, UK: 2012.

Currently IUD is exhibiting in The Fire and the Rose curated by Tongyu Zhou as part of the Asia Triennial 14. The work is located in the Vertical Gallery, 3rd Floor, Benzie Building , Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. We have created a Temporary Research Space, an invitation to spend time exploring selected materials from our archive, derived from fieldwork and other research in Salford, UK and Guangzhou, China. Also included are a small sample of related critical and fieldwork texts. The show is on until November 28th.