liminopia and critical practice - part one

TangentProjects was delighted to take part in the recent Critical Practice event, Parade: Public Modes of Assembly and Forms of Address as part of the Market of Ideas segment on Sunday 23 May 2010.

We used our recent work with Liminopia as the trajectory to host a series of informal discussions with invited guests from the art, design and architecture industries, as well as the Market of Ideas audience. The brief we gave was simple:

‘Liminopia’ is a fantasy cityscape in miniature, constructed from found materials by TangentProjects over a period of 5 months. More than a physical piece of work, Liminopia has become both a meditation on acts of collaboration between the three artists and an investigation into the nature of construction, planning and social inclusion and exclusion as experienced through the structures of our cities. 



Using a plan of the Liminopia cityscape as a focal point, TangentProjects would like to engage in an informal discussion with a panel of invited guests and members of the visiting public during today’s Market of Ideas event. The aim of this informal discussion is to explore various ideas generated from Liminopia’s creation rather than Liminopia itself. Possible topics to explore are the notion of publicness and how it influences our perception of the built environment, the idea of collaboration and how we interpret, are influenced by and navigate our own urban landscape. 



The discussions that ensue will be recorded as a part of the Liminopia project and all participants are invited to contribute to the discussion as little or as much as they see fit, as well as annotate or draw on the plan itself should they wish to.

The resulting discussions were filmed and will be uploaded to our website in segments once the editing is done. Meanwhile, here's a taster, courtesy of &&& Creative and Helene Kazan as well as a bit of background to that clip:

Sunday, 23 May 2010, saw the Parade courtyard at Chelsea College of Art occupied by a large structure made entirely out of milk crates to house Market of Ideas, as part of the weekend long Parade event organised by Critical Practice. TangentProjects, one of the 'stall holders', invited &&& Creative to join their day long discussion on notions of creative collaboration, the urban landscape and ideas of publicness. Helene Kazan interviewed Simon Brown, Shawn Davey and Lucas Krull individually about their own practices and collectively as &&& Creative.

mapping liminopia

a composite of liminopia pieced together from 'aerial' photograph:

 

composite with overlay:

drawing the plan:

liminopia - selected images

liminopia - march 2010

facing the front of liminopia, shanty town in foreground - march 2010

aeriel shot - march 2010

aeriel shot - wasteland/factory/council estate/river - march 2010

 aeriel shot - shantytown - march 2010

liminopia apartments - march 2010

liminopia at dusk - march 2010

aerial shot - monolith (centre) toxic waste dump (left), green belt (back left) urban dwellings (back right) financial district (right)  - march 2010

fun fair - march 2010

monoleith detail - march 2010

night scape - march 2010

invented waterways - march 2010

From the Ruins of Liminopia

Liminopia was a fantasy, a model urban landscape free from constraints of scale constructed of random materials found by chance. It was a series of spatial contradictions, emanating from the Travellers Box which in this incarnation, turned upside down, issued forth from a hilltop an expanding city from the imaginations of the three artist/architects. The dialogues between the architects of this city came more through the internal preconceptions of urban planning, architecture, landscape and the material structure of the urban environment. We embarked on the project with notions of collaboration through conversation, dialogue, dissent and negotiation to construct a city of our choosing only to find that the preconceptions controlled and led us to construct from almost subconscious dialogue with the found materials. Ultimately despite the measured placings of each of the sites that made up the city in its entirety Liminopia in many ways made itself, perhaps less so for the other two architects but for me represents the life of a city which pervades our consciousness, suggests behaviours and subtly subverts and alters our own wishes for the immediate world around us. We are directed not only by our own motivations and the agendas of those who have more power over our cities, and therefore us, but also by our urban world which absorbs all the differing agendas, assumptions, hopes and wishes of its inhabitants and emits these back again in silent and unseen combinations.


Liminopia never had a history, it's (assumed) inhabitants never spoke, it never created an infrastructure that we recognise in our real cities that would enable it to live. Now that it is demolished and its heart, the Travellers Box, has moved on to its next incarnation, we can begin to discuss and decipher the ideas it suggests to us back in the real world. The documentation of its existence can now be created, interpreted and used to create a dialogue and conversation between the three architects to determine what this process of collaboration but also perhaps a wider understanding of the urban environment we share means to us and our fellow city dwellers. SS

a well earned beer

steve, helene & karen relaxing after the final shoot

the marks of time

as we begin to dismantle the mini metropolis that has become such a part of our lives, and, quite frankly, has dominated the studio for the past 6 months, and send the box on it's way to focAR group, it's time to reflect a bit. for me, one of the most interesting things about this collaboration has been the organic way it has unfolded and the parallels with building structures in the real world. unforeseen problems arise and decisions have to be taken. for instance, there was a time in the beginning where i really felt attached to the idea of protecting the structures from outside elements. the first heavy rain put paid to that and gave some areas of our 'city' a battering. we took the decision to leave the marks rather than make it pristine and it felt quite natural to do that. after all, when one builds a structure in the real world, it does rain and things get wet. admittedly, in the real world, damage would be addressed, but in our case, we felt the marks left represented traces of time elapsing and of the reality of dealing with the elements, even in our fantasy metropolis.

aerial shot before the rain

 aerial shot after the rain...

another interesting thing is the notion of scale. in the real world, scale, measurements and balance, both aesthetically and practically, are rather important. and those things were important to us, at least we assumed this in the beginning. but when it came to creating this space, the notion of scale went right out the window, and, it has to be said, rather quickly. the choice to use found materials dictated the scale, or lack of, and i think that added an element of sheer fantasy and impossibility that was in keeping with the idea of 'liminopia'. --ka