When light can shape the invisible

Give me some polygons, nature and light: you will immediately catch my attention. I recently bumped into two different works which I would like to spend some words on.

Image taken from javierriera.es

The first one is the the project of a spanish artist, Javier Riera, who created spectacular perspectives projecting geometrical shapes on a natural landscape. The result is a suggestive painting, where light adds depth and volume to the natural canvas and geometry gives abstraction to the view. As the artist said in an interview, “geometry has the quality of representing the driving forces of nature that are not visible, the immaterial design of things, the origin of energy and matter”. The projection of scattered geometrical shapes into such context makes me feel out of place and wonder wether the view is real or not.

Cambodian Trees, by french artist Clement Briend, is the second project that drew my curiosity. The work is based on the digital projection of images from cambodian spirits and deities on big trees in different urban areas of Phnom Phen. The projections want to be a visual representation of the divine spirits that live in our world. They have a powerful impact that creates a sort of spiritual aura in the urban environment.

Image taken from thisiscolossal.com

In both cases the projections create an effect which is halfway between sculpture and installation, and light, together with the natural element, gives the pictures an unusual depth, and a mesmerising effect to our minds.

Buff This

Some time ago I wrote a post describing an interesting and crazy documentary about the unconscious art of graffiti removal. Recently WAV (We Are Visual), urban activists and artists from Germany, made up a project which reminded me about this documentary. During a trip to Russia they documented all the buffed walls they found on the streets of St. Petersburg, creating this way a sort of alphabet or, as they said, an ABC of the city, their own way of reading the urban context. The common act of covering tag or graffiti can be charged with different meaning:  it can be read as an unconscious form of abstractionism or, as in this case, as a visual contemporary spelling-book.

Also, sometimes it is possible to play with these sad stains of colourless paint. The artist Mobrst for instance uses buffs as a base for his own pieces. He deliberately has fun of this practice by writing ironic and sarcastic short sentences on buffed walls. In his piece Playing with the buff man he tried to find an acceptable shade of grey, creating a “dialog” between himself and the buff man who, unconscious of the game, had to paint over the stencils, againg and again. Mobstr is putting an issue, like if he was challenging the municipality to a duel. In another of his pieces he also thanks the city council for their “obiedient collaboration”.

Images taken from mobstr.org

Both artists are taking advantage of elements already present in the city frame, focusing attention on it in different way and, like in Mobstr’s case, underlining the absurd behave of a city who blindly act against any form of urban intervention without even looking at it.

Fiat Lux

 

I’m fascinated by the sun-shaped lamp, called Little Sun, designed by Olafur Eliasson, together with the engineer Frederik Ottesen. Eliasson was born in Iceland, a country where, during the winter, you cannot see any sunlight. That’s why he gives extreme importance to light in his works. Certainly everybody remember The Weather Project, realized at the Tate Modern, London, in 2003, where he installed a giant semi-circular object made up from hundreds of mono-frequency lamps, in order to recreate an artificial sun in the Turbine Hall of the museum. This new project is also about sunlight, but, this time, the small piece of art wants to be part of our everyday life, as the real sun. Little Sun is a solar-powered lamp, conceived to bring light to those countries were electricity is not accessible to everyone. As stated in their project web page: “Little Sun helps decentralize access to power in the world by making sustainable light available anywhere. It promotes economic growth in regions of the world where electricity is not available or reliable.”

On the other hand, I would like to show another kind of project: an intervention realized in Berlin, which concept lies on the opposite pole of Little Sun. Powerhouse 2 The People is a project conceived by the creative studio Cheesecake Powerhouse. What they did was give citizens the chance to take care of a small piece of their urban furniture, installing a switch on a streetlamp and letting people free to turn it on or off as they wanted, when they wanted. We’re used to have light in our life and often we don’t give value to it, sometimes we also waste it without even realizing it. This project faces the problem of sustainable energy-consumption, hacking the frame of the city, involving citizens and encouraging them to think about how their everyday life works. A small effort for a great effective result.

 

Reflecting on nature

Sometimes fireworks are not needed to create special effects. Sometimes we can reach an high level of beauty with very few simple ideas. Nature can do its part and make our job easier.

That’s the case of Edge Effect, a photographic project by Daniel Kukla, a young photographer with an interesting background in biology and anthropology. Awarded with an artist’s residency by the United States National Park Service in Joshua Tree National Park, California, he spent long time in the area between Sonoran and Mojave deserts. It is here that he documented, in a very simple and effective way, what ecologists call The Edge Effect, that is, the meeting of different ecosytems in the same natural environment. To record this phenomenon, Daniel Kukla choose few basic elements: a mirror, a painter’s easel and his camera. Reflecting a piece of a landscape in the mirror, he combines in the same picture two different images, two (sometimes) contrasting parts of the same natural scenery. The result is a fascinating game of lights and perspectives, that emulates the feeling of an hyperrealistic painting, placed within an open air museum in the middle of  the desert.

Kukla’s project reminds me a series of paintings by Magritte (titled The human condition, 1933/1935), wherewhere the landscape on the background of the canvas is exactly reproduced in a painting lying on a tripod, that can be seen in the foreground. The two images are placed on two different levels but they are one the sequel of the other. The Edge Effect is the exact opposite of Magritte’s artwork but, as in Magritte’s paintings, the different natural sceneries shown are part of the same setting or, better, they are the same environment. Perhaps, the end result is as powerful as the one produced by the belgian artist.

In The Edge Effect, nature is free to express itself without limits and filters, just a mirror as a canvas, revealing its grace.

Images taken from danielkukla.com

Keep the change and let the flowers bloom!

Money can’t buy happiness. Sure, but from now on it can make flowers and vegetables sprout! A nice new rework of the classic seed bomb has been created by the canadian designer Lea Redmond: the seed money. The seed money comprehends hand-illustrated  pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, garnished with the playful sentence “in soil we trust”. Each coin is made by paper and organic seeds. More precisely, the pennies contain a flower seeds mixture inside, the nickels a vegetables mix, the dimes a herb mix and the quarters a salad mix. The paper coins are just a green way to make people think about the relationship we have with nature and with money. As the author says:

“what if  having a pocket full of seeds was a sign of wealth and prosperity? A coin was once worth the actual amount of gold or silver it contained. Today, its value is purely representational. A melted down quarter is almost worthless and pennies are mostly just annoying. Our paper coins aim to re-infuse actual value into physical money. Seed Money promises to produce a bounty of beautiful, delightful, and edible experiences.”

The project has a page on kickstarter.com, where it reached and passed the initial goal of 10.000 dollars for its development. Depending from the support they received, they sent different quantities of rolls of seed money to let everyone spread the message in their city.
What is nice is that they didn’t think about this plantable coins just for gardeners. Community members are encouraged to use their creativity and, for instance, leave the coins in their tip at the restaurant, in public telephones, in cracks and slots in the ground, public parks, or even playfully try to use them at the bakery and so on…

The project uses these organic coins as a medium to give people consciousness about the real value of money and, at the same time, let them the chance to make their life greener. You can order seed money here.

Images found on inahbitat.com

A green thought beyond the obviousness

My street has no trees is not only a truth or a complaint we often hear about our cities, but also a new project run in Toronto that aims to beautify the neighborhoods, taking advantage of what the urban environment already provides.

The project uses Toronto’s Post and Ring bike stands in order to create original pots where to plant micro-gardens: a recycled plastic bottle is cut and turned into a small case for flowers or vegetables, then fixed on the top of the bike stands. Reuse and reinvent are the two key words of MSHNT; the micro-gardens are made to show people the enormous potential of public space and teach us to look at the urban environment  from a different point of view.In the web page of the project you can find instruction to build your own mini pot and bring some green in your neighborhood.

This summer 40 planters were installed in some of the main streets of Toronto. MSHNT is a public and participatory installation, an action call for everybody all around the world who want to underline the problem lack of plants and green spots in our cities.

The intent of the project is to raise awareness about the imbalance between the hardscape and softscapes of our streets, to encourage people to think critically about the transformative possibilities of our everyday environments, and to increase the beauty and joy of our neighborhoods.

Next time, don’t throw away a plastic bottle, it could be a small tool for starting big changes.

Next stop: a greener city

Some weeks ago in Chicago, for the fourth year, Art On Track took place: a huge mobile gallery on board of a CTA train, that circled in loop for five hours on september 17th to give the visitors a unique experience. Different artist customized each of the carriages, turning an everyday experience into something unusual: not just a boring trip on the way home, but a party of colors and original performances in the same place where we used to see the same grey routine. Every coach was a sort of pavilion where artists could show their works and ideas: someone turned the train into a cosy home, some others made up a fashion show and somebody else built a real garden, almost a jungle, in the small space of the carriage. This specific project, realized by noisivelvet is named  Mobile Garden. Covering the floor and all the seats with a carpet of green grass, the artists created a nice garden with indigenous plants and flowers spread in every corner of the track and hanging from the top.

This project was a sort of preview of the original one noisivelvet is currently trying to realize:
an open-air art installation of a native plant garden pulled behind the L line of Chicago subway for one month. Once tasted this appetizer, we cannot wait to see the big one.

Collective Architectures – Book review

“In March of 2007, when we found ourselves face to face with the possible handing over of the containers, I thought, instead of using all the containers at once for constructing a new large scale project at some pre-determined location, (…) why not distribute them among collectives with different locations and interests. And thus, a multiple, heterogeneous, and common experience would arise.”

The Role of Santiago Cirugeda in Trucks, Containers, Collectives, is basically the one of a technical consultant and provider of resources, materials and constructive know-how. Working in flexible use of constructing elements, buildings and sites, he and his team gained a thirteen-year-long experience on the topics of occupation and temporary structures. In the book, Cirugeda becomes a narrator of the lively experiences of Recetas Urbanas (Urban Prescriptions), which was founded with the aim of “putting down on paper the management elements we would need to achieve a clear objective” in building and/or improving underused sites with services for the citizens.

Two years after starting the experience of Camiones, Contenedores, Colectivos (Trucks, Containers, Collectives), the book develops a narrations in essays and project files through the complex experience of building a network of relationships ad interchanges which acquires the level of an experience-based architectural infrastructure. Each of the projects aim to plant a critical seed in a difficult urban context, underlining the lack of some services (or some civic spirit) in the area where the intervention is located. As very simple architectural installations, their power is indeed far from being small. Involving around 60 collectives in the process of defining a use, a location, and a shape for each of the containers which was used is a strong demonstration of how an architectural process can be open and based on practical activism instead of dull design obnoxiousness.

Articulated in four main sections, with contributions from various architects and theorists who went to know Cirugeda or worked with him during his career, the book of essays comes with the project files in an elegant but strong white cover with a QR-code on the front. The statements on the back warn us about the book being untrue, partial and useless and one of the first pages declares the volume incomplete and still open to contributions. Nevertheless, it can help the reader asking questions about the nature of the architectural practice, investigating facts and aspirations of this fascinating network.

Preview and buy the book here

A puzzle in the jungle

In april 2011, the artists El Tono and Momo were invited to participate in the event Nova Rio Contemporary Culture, organized in Rio de Janeiro by Rojo. They worked together to create some colorful sculptures at the Parque Lage. They decided to create something ephemeral and realized a modular wooden sculpture that could change its shape in an almost infinite range of possibilities. They model 23 pieces of wood that would be combined in different shapes and compositions. Then, after a week of work over the structure, they colored each piece and placed the sculptures through the park, in the middle of the jungle and its local fauna.

With their simple but provoking colorful structures, the artworks of El Tono and Momo have a familiar look to my eyes: they remind me some of Calder’s installations and sculptures. The sparkle of vivacity created from their works in the park is bright and attracting, and, although being non-natural elements, it seems like they were born in the park itself, together with trees and flowers.

Images taken from www.eltono.com

When art faced the real world

Image taken from urbanfields.wodpress.com

The New York Times recently published a list of the 41 things not to be missed during 2011. Between them there was also the new Museo del Novecento, in the very heart of Milan. So, some weeks ago, when we where traveling there, we decided to visit the museum, giving a chance to the world-renowned newspaper.
During this visit, we had the chance to see a temporary exhibition, organized in a hall of the museum and dedicated to the relationship between art and urban environment In Italy from 1968 to 1976. The exhibition is called FUORI! (Outside).

 

As the curators explain in the nice catalogue, around 1968 artists started to act outside galleries and museums, to face the real world and involve more and more people in their performances, installations and sculptures. While analyzing this movement, they especially focused on four historic events and exhibitions; in between them, Arte Povera + azioni povere, organized in 1968 in the old dockyard and in the streets of Amalfi, Campo Urbano, that took place in Como in 1969; Festival del Nouveau Réalisme, which happened the city of Milan in 1970, and Volterra 73 in the homonymous little town in tuscany during 1973.

Even if these events where different between each other in the specific interventions they presented, they all had a common line based on ephemeral performances happening in the streets of the cities, a sort of first step towards that feeling of appropriation that characterized the following years and the early seventies. One of the main goal was to create a closer relationship between artists and citizens, as well as to encourage people to participate to the life of their cities, as it was demanded by the social and political atmosphere of that time.
All of these events had basically an ephemeral soul, and that is why the exhibition prefers to tell this story with historical videos, pictures and slides. Visiting the exhibition, it was interesting to notice how what we are nowadays investigating has old and distant roots, also in our own country’s history.