Anatomy of a Street Publication launch, 6 July at 6 pm, The Showroom Gallery
London, 63 Penfold Street NW8 8PQ
Coinciding with the Anatomy of a Street exhibition on Church Street (26 June – 4th of July 2010) a corresponding publication will be launched. The case studies of the Anatomy of a Street publication (high streets from Hungary and London) are locations in cities where top-down national or municipal planning, corporate development, small businesses and bottom-up initiatives of the civic sphere intersect. The AoaS project reads urban transformation through 'uncommon' cultural, economic and social indicators, and questions some of the general assumptions that describe the relationship between public, private, civic and corporate elements in their effect on the city, the side-effects of top-down, large-scale urban development.
The publication's focus on the transformation of various urban sites will be highlighted by a roundtable dicussion. Invited guests include: Edward Quigley and Marco Torquati (Church Street Neighborhood Management), Neil Bennett (Terry Farrell's Architects), Nicholas Lobo Brennan (House of Jonn), Emily Pethick (The Showroom Gallery), Chole McCarthy and Magda Novoa (MyCityToo) and Marsha Bradfield (Critical Practice Group).
Contributiors of the publication include: Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, Nicholas Lobo Brennan, Edwin Heathcote, Deepa Naik&Trenton Oldfield, Allan Siegel, Péter Rákosi, Ders Csaba, Péter Lowas, Emőke Kerekes & Anna Mózes, Béla Káli, Gergely Kovács, László Munteán, Gabó Bartha, Ádám Albert, Bea Dávid, Réka Schutzmann & Csilla Zsuzsanna Vizl and Miklós Surányi.
Anatomy of the Street publication is edited by Levente Polyák & Eszter Steierhoffer and designed by Pedro Cid Proenca, Sophie Demay & Afonso Duarte
for more information visit: www.anatomyofastreet.org
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Anatomy of a Street exhibition at the London Festival of Architecture, 26 June – 4 July
Church Street Paddington, London NW8
photo by Emőke Kerekes
Anatomy of a Street is an on-going research project portraying epicenters of an accelerated urban transformation: two examples of the ‘high street’ from Pécs and Budapest in comparison with Church street in Paddigton (London).
Focusing on urban development and regeneration , the project explores the fluidly changing relationship of the public, the private and the corporate; the interactions of the top-down and bottom-up organizational processes thematically through mapping local communities, migration, gentrification, local businesses and industries, food production and contribution as well as diverse traditions and new cultural enterprises. Based on an international and interdisciplinary platform, Anatomy of a Street attempts to connect different discursive fields and disciplines as well as networks belonging to different geographical locations, cultures and histories between eastern and western Europe after the cold war.
The exhibition unfolds along Church Street in the shop windows and market stall, and includes photography, film, urban interventions as well as performances by artists, activists and architects: Albert Ádám, Gabó Bartha, Bahbak HashemiüNezhad, Emőke Kerekes & Anna Mózes, Péter Rákosi, Allan Siegel, Miklós Surányi, Szövetség39 )anna Baróthy & Csenge Kolozsvári) and screenings by no.w.here in collaboration with The Edgware Road Project - Free Cinema School of the Serpentine Gallery.
photo by House of Jonn
To navigate through Church Street and the exhibition, a map and audio guide by House of Jonn is avaliable at Church Street Library (Church Street n.97-97)
PV: 25th June, Monira Cafe, 56 Church Street, NW8 8ET
Opening times:
Tuesday - Friday: 10 am - 7 pm
Saturday: 10 am - 5 pm
Sunday-Monday: closed
EVENTS AND PERFORMANCES:
- Situated amongst the daily market traders, AUBERGINE:NW8 - "Share a Recipe, Take an Aubergine!" is a subtle public intervention in Church Street Market. A project that seeks to explore and further understand the ethnically diverse community that surrounds and benefits from the street market. A market store table and seating will be set up to provide an area for exchanging the cross-culturally popular staple ingredient “the aubergine” for humble home-cooking recipes. Project by Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad.
- Dates:
- June: 26th (12am - 4pm),
July: 2nd (12am - 4pm), 3rd (12- 4pm)
Brunch with Gabo Bartha and Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad on the 4th of July from 12- 4pm
Coinciding with the exhibition a corrisponding publication will be produced comprising research material. Publication launch: July 6, 6pm - 8pm in The Showroom Gallery, 63 Penfold Street, London NW8 8PQ
Exhibition curated by Levente Polyák and Eszter Steierhoffer.
Anatomy of a Street is supported by the European Capital of Culture - Pécs 2010 in collaboration with the Hungarian Cultural Centre and the KÉK - Contemporary Architecture Centre in Budapest, British Council Budapest and the Church Street Neighbourhood Centre in London. Screenings by no.w.here and the Free Cinema School are organised in collaboration with The Egware Road Project of the Serpentine Gallery.
The exhibition is part of the International Architecture Showcase organised by the British Council and The Architecture Foundation for the LONDON FESTIVAL OF ARCHITECTURE 2010.
Art Network Agency (ANA) launch and roundtable discussion 1st of April, 5.30-7.30 pm, Whitechapel Gallery
photo by Eszter Gero
PARTICIPANTS: Marsha Bradfield (Critical Practice Group, Chelsea); Nicholas Lobo Brennan; Carmen Billows (Department21); Rita Kálmán (ACAX); Catalina Lozano (gasworks); Jonathan Miles (RCA); Trenton Oldfield (TIANG); Eszter Steierhoffer (ANA); Ildikó Takács (director, HCC); Jack Tan (Chair); Pieternel Vermoortel (FormContent); apologies: Polly Brannan (publicworks); Will Holder; Sophie Hope; Magda Raczynska (Polish Cultural Institute)
AGENDA:
I. Introductions
II. Introducing the work of ANA (Eszter Steierhoffer)
III. A word about networks (Jack Tan)
IV. Discussion (transcript available soon)
Beyond tracing the contemporary art scene in London, ANA endeavors to fulfill the role of a specialised mediator, providing space for discussion and reflection. Before our first public event – the launch of the IMPEX book “We Are Not Ducks on a Pond, but Ships at Sea" – we held an informal salon discussion at the Goshka Macuga roundtable at the Whitechapel Gallery. Central to the shaping of ANA, the three inter-related points under discussion were 'network', 'translation - mediation' and 'self-organisation'. As starting points to the main discussion we considered the following quotes and texts:
"Network is a concept, not a thing out there. It is a tool to help describe something, not what is being described."
(Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press)
"A shape, an object, is stable and singular if it is configured within a stable set of links with other entities. Within a stable grammar or syntax of those links. Hull, spars, sails, stays, stores, rudder, crew, water, winds, all of these entities (and many others) have to be held in place, so to speak functionally, if we are to be able to point to an object and call it a ship (7). Now notice this. A working ship is, yes, a continuous Cartesian object, a constant set of Cartesian co-ordinates ... On the other hand, however, it is also a constant and continuous network object, a ‘network shape’."
(Law, J. (2000). Objects, Spaces and Others. Available:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/law-objects-spaces-others.pdf
Last accessed 29 March 2010.)
"In all language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated; depending on the context in which it appears, it is something that symbolizes or something symbolized. It is the former only in the finite products of language, the latter in the evolving of the languages of themselves. And that which seeks to represent, to produce itself in the evolving of languages, is that very nucleus of pure language. … to turn the symbolizing into the symbolized, to regain pure language fully formed in the linguistic flux, is the tremendous and only capacity of translation."
(p. 80 The Task of the Translator, pp. 70-82 Illuminations, Walter Benjamin, Pimlico, London, 1999, translated by Harry Zorn.)
"I am beginning to think that there are two fundamental factors that help to explain the consistency of self-organized human activity. The first is the existence of a shared horizon - aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and/or metaphysical - which is patiently and deliberately built up over time, and which gives the members of a group the capacity to recognize each other as existing within the same referential universe, even when they are dispersed and mobile. ... The second is the capacity for temporal coordination at a distance : the exchange among a dispersed group of information, but also of affect, about unique events that are continuously unfolding in specific locations. This exchange of information and affect then becomes a set of constantly changing, constantly reinterpreted clues about how to act in the shared world. The flow aspect of the exchange means that the group is constantly evolving, and it is in this sense that it is an "ecology," a set of complex and changing inter-relations ; but this dynamic ecology has consistency and durability, it becomes recognizable and distinctive within the larger environment of the earth and its populations, because of the shared horizon that links the participants together in what appears as a world (or indeed as a cosmos, when metaphysical or religious beliefs are at work)."
(Holmes, B. (2006). Network, swarm, microstructure. Available:
http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Network-swarm-microstructure.html
Last accessed 29 March 2010.)
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BOOK LAUNCH
“We are not ducks on a pond but ships at sea*
independent art initiatives, Budapest 1989-2009”
1st April 2010, Thursday at 8 pm
Hungarian Cultural Centre, 10 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden
London, WC2E 7NA
On the occasion of the ANA launch we will present the book WE ARE NOT DUCKS ON A POND BUT SHIPS AT SEA* introduced by Rita Kálmán.
To book please contact: info@artnetworkagency.org.uk
"This book endeavors to introduce the independent art scene of the past 20 years in Budapest as well as to provide assistance to interpret its relation to the economic and 'ideological' framework of society. The book offers a missing biography, providing a reference for understanding the relationship between the self-organized and the institutionalized, and the manifold ways in which these structures mutually shape one another. It is about projects set up by non-bureaucratic structures which emerge and are transformed along various schemes before disappearing. It is about sites, which elude self-definition and almost never leave behind any documented trace." (Katarina Sevic)
Edited by Rita Kálmán and Katarina Sevic (IMPEX), design by Kasia Korczak.
* title freely quoted after Lawrence Weiner
