Mind Space

Switched on London

A number of buildings in London around the Thames are being illuminated with low-energy lighting for an event called Switched on London. The event raises the need to balance the importance of  lighting in the nocturnal urban landscape with the need to save energy.

Being low-energy, some of the buildings weren't quite as stunning as I had hoped, but it's worth a stroll nevertheless. But you'll have to be quick; it finishes tomorrow, 14th February.

The picture is of Southwark Cathedral, but there are a few more in my set on Flickr.

Technorati tags: Switched On London, London, low-energy lighting

Bubbles

Click the photo to see the image on Flickr. It's much better large.

I took this last week at the Science Museum, who for one night only opened their interactive science exhibit Launchpad to an adults-only crowd. This was from the bubble show.

Also, congratulations to Joel Baker aka cntrst, who won the first heat of the open dex competition for DJs at the Big Chill Bar. He goes through to the final in July, and the overall winner gets to DJ a set at the Big Chill festival in the summer.

Technorati tags: bubble, Science Museum, Launchpad, Big Chill Bar, cntrst

I'm in print!

I'm really chuffed that this photograph has been published in the December 2007 edition of Artforum, a New York-based art magazine.

It's a large-format magazine, and the photo is a double-page spread. I had to do some careful processing to get a high enough image quality for reproduction, but it was worth it to go into the shop in Tate Modern this afternoon and see my photo in the magazine on the shelf..

The subject of the photos is Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth, a crack in the floor of Tate Modern. The space was invaded by a mobile clubbing event, which filled the hall with dancers gyrating to music on their ipods.

Technorati Tags: Tate Modern,Shibboleth,mobile clubbing,Artforum Magazine

The Masque of the Red Death

I've just been to see The Masque of the Red Death at Battersea Arts Centre. The evening is based on the macabre short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. But rather than being presented on stage in front of the audience, the stories unfold through the rooms of the rambling old building, and the audience walks around. The two main foci are the grand central staircase and a theatre decked out as a Victorian music hall. But the stories weave and intersect through many other rooms as well; a wine cellar, a perfume boutique, an opium den, a cloak shop and an attic bedroom, as well as the suite of rooms comprising the house of Usher. Every room contains period props and furniture that you can pick up and examine; the audience is free to roam and explore the set. You can spend an evening in the music hall, watching the entertainments and plots as they swing through, or do as I did, and follow particular actors around the building to see their story.

This is storytelling without the linearised conventions of theatre; whenever you choose to stand and watch something, you miss something else that is taking place in another room. Each member of the audience comes away with a unique experience of the evening. It was the most exciting piece of theatre I've seen in a long time. For three hours I was immersed in a different world.

Performances on Friday and Saturday night conclude with a masque party that goes on into the early hours, with dancing, cabaret and sideshows.

The initial run of the production is completely sold out, but they have just extended the run to April. Tickets are selling fast!

Technorati tags: Technorati tags: The Masque of the Red Death, Edgar Allan Poe, Punchdrunk, Battersea Arts Centre, BAC

Maman 1999

This sculpture by Louise Bourgeois is currently sitting outside Tate Modern, part of their retrospective of her work.

Technorati tags: Louise Bourgeois, Maman 1999, Tate Modern

Dancing on the edge

On Friday night I dropped into Tate Modern to have a look at Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth, the new installation in the turbine hall. It's a crack in the floor, beginning at one end as a hairline fracture, and opening out into a deep fissure in the middle of the hall.

A Shibboleth is a word or cultural device that acts as a test of membership of a society (from Judges 12:1-6). The following quotes are from the exhibition leaflet;

‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others. Our own time, Salcedo is keen to remind us, remains defined by the existence of a huge socially excluded underclass, in Western as well as post-colonial societies.
In breaking open the floor of the museum, Salcedo is exposing a fracture in modernity itself. Her work encourages us to confront uncomfortable truths about our history and about ourselves with absolute candidness, and without self-deception.

Perhaps Shibboleth will help us think about how racial divisions run through British society, where many people are blinded by the belief that we've grown beyond racism. Or maybe we'll just play around with the crack, and never look to closely at what it signifies.

Salcedo  has remained tight-lipped about how the crack was made, but it will leave a permanent scar on the building when it's filled in.

While I was there, the hall became remarkably full for an unusual piece of modern art. Then the crowd pulled out their ipods and headphones, and began dancing wildly. Someone in the middle of the hall coordinated the occasional cheer, but otherwise everyone danced to their own music. Other than the fast-rising smell of sweat, it was all harmless and friendly. It's coordinated from a website, www.mobile-clubbing.com.

Technorati tags: Technorati tags: London, Tate Modern, Salcedo, Shibboleth, Silent Disco, mobile clubbing

The Truth Isn't sexy

I've spent a fair amount of time this week handing out beermats similar in style to the image above. Sometimes I was wearing a dog collar, and people expressed shock that a vicar should be distributing such material. The headline reads 'Natasha's been a naughty girls', and the text below says,

She tried to escape from her traffickers. Instead she was imprisoned, beaten and forced to have sex with up to forty men a day. Her pimp says he will kill her baby if she tries it again.

The truth isn't sexy.

It's a campaign against sex trafficking led by a small group of inspired volunteers from the UK emerging church network. On Saturday they oprganised a 'pub crawl' in Croydon, and I went along. Instead of drinking lots of beer, we offered campaign beer mats and posters to the managers of each of the pubs we stopped at. My group visited eleven pubs, and nine took beer mats. In the other two, the manager was out, and the staff didn't have the authority to take them. No-one refused point-blank.

I've just spent the last couple of days at the chaplaincy stand at the Freshers Fair at Thames Valley University in Ealing. As well as telling people about the  chaplaincy, I handed out TTIS beer mats, and got into a lot of conversations about sex trafficking. It got the message about sex trafficking out to a lot of students, and it was an effective piece of chaplaincy work as well; everyone knows that I'm the chaplain, and something of what I stand for.

 

The next pub crawl is in Ealing on Saturday 17th November, beginning at 11:30. It's being organised by The Truth Isn't Sexy in conjunction with Grace and the TVU Chaplaincy. I'll post more details on the blog when I have them. Everyone is welcome, provided you are old enough to enter a pub.

Technorati tags: The Truth Isn't Sexy, sex trafficking, prostitution, slavery

Event Horizon

Antony Gormley's latest large-scale sculpture work is Event Horizon, a series of life-size casts of his own body positioned on the buildings and walkways in and around the South Bank Centre.

At the end of last year I saw Gormley's installation of similar figures standing on the beach at Crosby, looking out to sea. There the figures were watchful and waiting; thoughts of the second coming bumbled vaguely around my mind. In the brutalist urban setting of the South Bank, the figures have a more alarming aspect. Soon after they were erected, an observer reported a potential suicide to the police, and someone has left a comment on one of my Flickr photos to the same effect. Maybe I'm paranoid, but they make me feel watched. Of course, there are enough surveillance cameras around the south bank to justify this feeling, but the stillness and prominent positioning of the figures suggests attentiveness.

I've started a Flickr set to collect these images together.

Technorati tags: London, sculpture, Gormley, southbank, eventhorizon

The National Gallery, Nelson's Column, Lions and... grass?

 

Whilst walking across Trafalgar Square yesterday afternoon, I was quite astounded to see that it was lawned over. The grass was very wet, but people were sitting, chatting, eating and drinking on it. The square is normally a little forbidding. No-one sits on the ground, and the place has the atmosphere of a place to look at or pass through, rather than linger. The grass gives the place a completely different atmosphere, and people permission to relax, unwind and chat.

It's all in aid of the launch of the Village London, tourism campaign. It will be gone by tonight (Friday 25th May). And it seems they've done their bit for the environment, too.

 

Technorati tags: London, Trafalgar Square, grass, lawn, Village London