Category Archives: Place

Graeme Miller, Linked (2003-)

aerial view of a roadway

Graeme Miller, Linked (2003-)

“Commissioned by the Museum of London, Graeme Miller’s ongoing Linked project opened in July 2003 as a massive semi-permanent sound work and off-site exhibition of the contemporary collection of the Museum of London.

Stretching across from Hackney Marshes to Redbridge, the M11 Link Road was completed in 1999 after the demolition of 400 homes, including Miller’s own, amid dramatic and passionate protest. Concealed along the three-mile route, 20 new transmitters continually broadcast hidden voices, recorded testimonies and rekindled memories of those who once lived and worked where the motorway now runs evoking a cross-section of East London life. Day and night, voices and music were broadcast along the length of the route.

IN RECOVERY

Linked has endured as perhaps the largest sonic installation and sculptural entity in London for over 18 years. Since 2003 its transmitters have broadcast over a million times the voices of former residents of the 500 buildings demolished to build the M11 Link Road motorway.

Over these years some of the transmitters have been lost – to a lorry crashing into a lamppost, to accidentally being taken down by contractors, to weather, time and entropy. Amazingly many have endured and have become an almost secret layer of the landscape of East London. It is not only time to refurbish this work, but time to look at how it works in time and how public art endures or de-commissions itself. With this in mind Graeme Miller is currently looking to stage RE-Linked in 2022: the first annual 48-hour restoration of the entire network that will also include a reflective public conversation between former residents, interviewees and interviewers, sound and radio artists, eco-activists and, as ever, the wider curious walking public.

Please watch this space for developments and join us in 2022

“I found myself wishing that more of Britain was covered by such transmissions, ghosts of ravaged neighbourhoods set free to speak again.”

Libby Purves, The Times” (credit)

Carol Maurer, Walking Forward, Looking Back (2018-19)

people on the floor in a gallery

Carol Maurer, Walking Forward, Looking Back (2018-19)

“Walking forward, looking back is a practice-based project utilizing a journey through the landscape. Artist Carol Maurer walks from her ancestral home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland through Delaware to Chester County PA, collecting stories, photos, memories and objects along the route. Rediscovering histories – both true and false. ​The journey began as a way to experientially confront her responsibility as a descendant of enslavers and slowly weaves into a meditation on the time, tempos, conversations and understandings walking can make space for.” (credit)

Kristina Borg, The Cities Within (2016) Alternative DIY Walk – Vienna, Austria

people walking in a city with headphones and zines

Kristina Borg, The Cities Within (2016) Alternative DIY Walk – Vienna, Austria

Kristina Borg

“In 2016, the methodology and practice outlined in the previous section (Alternative DIY Walks) resulted in the project The Cities Within. This walk was specific to the city of Vienna (Austria), precisely to the neighbourhoods of Leopoldstadt and Favoriten, the 2nd and the 10th districts respectively. This project was made possible as part of the Artists in Residence programme of the Austrian Federal Chancellery and KulturKontakt Austria, and also supported by the Cultural Export Fund of Arts Council Malta.​” (credit)

“Alternative DIY Walks

These alternative do-it-yourself walk-tours are specific to different cities. Starting off with a series of conversations with a number of locals, the artist gains knowledge about their day-to-day experience of their city. Gleaning information from these conversations, together with onsite-research walking, the artist maps-out a number of hidden and/or neglected spaces, significant to personal and collective memory, so as to create a fictional-narrative based on a mix of fantasy and reality.

The narrative forms basis for a sound-walk that takes the shape of a do-it-yourself walk-tour and invites the participant/walker/wanderer to enter a one-to-one relationship with that city. Through a combination of recorded found, ambience sounds and a voiceover narration, one is guided through different neighbourhoods, streets, spaces and places. This project purposefully moves away from the city touristic centre and focuses on the outer districts/areas which more often than another are neglected by authorities. During such one and a half to two hour walks one passes through streets and places that are not always so common, but are significant to the daily lives and memory of the local inhabitants. Each DIY walk is also complemented with a series of illustrated maps, presented in the form of a booklet, which help indicate the way as well as when to play or pause the audio. From time to time the audio is paused so as to get a live experience of the place here and now.

Through this mix of fantasy and reality it is up to the participant/walker/wanderer to decide how to interpret the narrative, whether to take it as a fact, a metaphor or a dream. ” (credit)

Mollie Rice, “Field Study, Parramatta Road” (2018)

drawings of abstract lines on the wall and curled up on a pedestal

“Mollie Rice explores human spatiality, and sensations of place, through an experimental drawing practice. Multiple visits to a particular site by the artist yield sound recordings, which are then translated into drawings in the studio, creating a complex connection between percpetion and place, action and experience. The works in this exhibition were created through a series of ten thousand step walks along Parramatta Road, starting from a place of significance to the artist and ending in a new location, which is then explored through processes of active listening and the physical record of drawing. ” (credit)

Robert Bean and Barbara Lounder, Breathing-in-the-Breathable (2017-19)

“Breathing-in-the-Breathable is an on-going collaborative artwork by Robert Bean and Barbara Lounder. Their project presents walking as experience, public art and pedagogy. To date, the artists have contextualized this artwork in relation to four sites; 1) Breathing-in-the-Breathable: an annotated walk (2017) on the ruins of a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Polish town of Sokołowsko; 2) Breathing-in-the-Breathable: Weathering (2018) based on a number of walks in the Lake District; 3) Breathing-in-the-Breathable: The Commons (2019) in Halifax, Nova Scotia; 4) Being-in-the Breathable: 44.649589,-63.574150 (2019) a public walk and installation based on a visit to Halifax in 1973 by the Japenese Conceptual artist, On Kawara.

This participatory project utilizes event scores, objects, sound, and walking to consider how the atmosphere and environment are made explicit through militarism and the climate crises. Along with the site-specific projects, the concept of “being-in-the-breathable” (Sloterdijk, 2009) provides Bean and Lounder with an adaptive framework for this collaborative artwork. The project engages an understanding of walking as an experiential method which simultaneously disturbs histories, ideologies and habits and also generates new networks of meaning spanning temporal frames, public spaces, disciplinary boundaries, and embodied sensorial modalities (Ingold and Vergunst, 2008).” (credit)

 

Vanessa Berry, Parramatta Road: Landmarks and Monuments (2014)

“In the map of Parramatta Road created by Vanessa Berry, quintessential Parramatta Road features like car dealerships and teddy bear stores are elevated to the status of hallowed landmarks. Author of the book Mirror Sydney, and the blog of the same name, Berry explores and reflects the city with the eyes of someone who has traversed it, many times, and looked with intent at the fine details of its fabric and features.” (credit)

A.L. Steiner + robbinschilds, with AJ Blandford + Kinski, C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), (20017-Present)

“C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) is a collaborative video, installation and performance work by artists A.L. Steiner + robbinschilds, with AJ Blandford and Seattle-based band Kinski. The performance and installation-based works have been presented in exhibition and performance venues internationally. The video works range from a single-channel piece (C.L.U.E., Part I), to multichannel pieces, up to 13-channels. ” (credit)

Bill Gilbert, Walk to Work (2009)

“For twenty-two years I have made the hour long drive from my house in Cerrillos to my office at the University of New Mexico. For this piece, I decided to walk to work. I strapped on a backpack, headed out my door and walked as straight a line as possible (given the variations in topography, land ownership, etc.) to my office at UNM. Along the roughly 50 mile trek across ranch land, the Sandia Mountains and the northeast quadrant of Albuquerque I recorded my perceptions from the perspective of a lone hiker walking across the land.

This work is part of a series of “Physiocartographies.” Started in 2003 in the field with the Land Arts of the American West mobile studio, the physiocartographies  series combines the abstraction of cartographic maps with the physical act of walking the surface of the planet to create portraits of place. In the various works from this series I follow prescribed paths across the landscape using a gps unit to navigate and record points, a camera to shoot images and a digital recorder to capture sounds. The final works appear as reconstructed maps, videos and installations.” (credit)

Modelab, Ghost Walker (2014-15)

“Like photography negatives, urban design comprises information on what is not visible and only can be inferred by its contours. In this manner, urban geography becomes a catalogue of defeats and absences that can be interpreted from what once existed.

Based on Mexico City maps from 1867 and 1892, superposed on a 2014 Google map of the Juarez and Cuauhtémoc neighbourhoods, this project seeks to create an appropriation of histories through an artistic and scholar exploration of a specific street that ceased to exist more than a century ago.

Following the techniques of the Situationist’s dérive and Andrei Monastyrsky’s work with the Collective Actions Group, Ghost Walker: An Impossible Walk Through Mexico City’s History is a longitudinal study of a specific urban space, witness of a myriad of processes and modifications throughout 150 years

Ghost Walker (2014-15) has been presented at Muca Roma in Mexico City (2016), and as part of the group exhibition “Walk With Us” at the Rochester Arts Center (2022).

Participants: Sandra Calvo, Ramiro Chaves, Erick Meyenberg, Raul Ortega Ayala, Sergio Miranda Pacheco, Manuel Rocha Iturbide, Modelab.

DOWNLOAD PUBLICATION

Modelab is an artistic initiative aiming to promote interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of public space, history, and cartography.

Formed in 2014 by Claudia Arozqueta and Rodrigo Azaola, Modelab projects have taken place in streets, parks, billboards, beaches, museums, vacant retail stores, and other spaces in Australia, New Zealand, France, Mexico, Taiwan, and the Philippines.” (credit)

Diane Borsato, All the Names for Everything (2017)

“ALL THE NAMES FOR EVERYTHING, Walk/Performance,  2017

ALL THE NAMES FOR EVERYTHING was a walk on Mount Nemo with diverse outdoor education leaders bringing various scientific and cultural perspectives on naming flora and fauna along the Bruce Trail in Ontario, Canada.

The popular nature educator Richard Aaron spoke of scientific botanical and common English naming, while Melanie Gray of wolf clan from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory discussed spiritual and medicinal connections to plants in addition to some of their names in Mohawk, and Jon Johnson, a community-based Indigenous scholar discussed place names and the history and ongoing presence of Indigenous peoples in the Toronto region.

Together we considered the origins and meanings of botanical names, numerous common names, and names in different languages of many of the places, plants and animals encountered along our walk.

I had been thinking about the colonial histories that are conspicuously silent (or worse, the violence and erasure still being perpetuated) whenever I study nature, take workshops, read field guides, or lead students and others in the woods. With this project – I hoped to expand the terms of nature-education, by bringing together a diverse crowd of knowledgeable community members interested in plants, ecological relationships, and land.

We discussed names that give evocative descriptions, that tell of our many relationships to plants and other creatures, to languages and names that were absent and lost to Indigenous peoples, and to racist names – that speak to our often difficult relationships with each other.

ALL THE NAMES FOR EVERYTHING is part of an ongoing commitment to developing relationships with Indigenous elders, artists, researchers, and educators – and including Indigenous perspectives in my own work and teaching.

The piece was part of a larger project by Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatsky of Public Studio called New Field: Tracing Decolonisation.

Photos here by Emily Moriarty, Amish Morrell, Richard Aaron and Diane Borsato. ” (credit)