‘Real Estate: a project by Fugitive Images’
Date uploaded: March 6, 2015
The DIG Collective present a series of events entitled 'Real Estate: a project by Fugitive Images’ from the 11th to the 14th of March 2015 at PEER Gallery, Hoxton Street, LONDON. DIG will ‘evict’ and board up PEER gallery for the duration of the residency, its frontage becoming the backdrop for an accumulation of layered developers’ propaganda, occupation, rehabilitation and the effect of natural forces, all emerging over the period of four days.
Out on the pavement, the artists become narrators of a story of precariousness and infinite uncertainty where time precipitates into a shambolic sped-up cycle of making and unmaking, settling and uprooting. These actions allude to the increasing speed of temporality in contemporary urban spaces, and the people caught up in between.
Only a window cut through this ever-changing surface reveals a rabbit-hole through to a different logic of time.
EVENTS PROGRAMME
Wed 11th March 6.30-8.30pm
“Public Housing in the Neoliberal City: What is to be done?"
In a city increasingly dedicated to privatisation, evictions and exclusionary ‘regeneration’ projects, what will happen to public housing? And how can public housing residents fight back against attempts to remove them? This event will be an open discussion with Thomas Gann (South London Renters), David Madden (London School of Economics) and Lisa McKenzie (London School of Economics / Class War), scholars and activists working on housing in London and beyond. The point is both to understand the place of public housing in the neoliberal city and to help develop strategies for changing it.
Thu 12th March 12-1.30pm
Seminar of Middlesex students, with IsikKnutsdottir
Thu12th March 6.30-8.30pm
Private View: ‘House Warming, Leaving Do’
Fri 13th March 6.30-8.30pm
Screening of ‘Utopia London’, by Tom Cordell
Introduction by Tom Cordell; Q&A session with Tom Cordell and Kate Mackintosh BIOS
Sat 14th March 3-5pm
Beyond planning: Fake Estates, SLOAP, empty homes; limits to the monetisation of contemporary urban space. With Paul Watt, Melissa Butcher and Jon Fitzmaurice.Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘Fake Estates’ was a project dealing with symbolic acquisition of slivers of urban land in the NYC of the 70s in which he higlighted the conceptual value of invisible ‘properties without use’ and ‘ownership with no real estate value’ in the urban space.
Many years later, David Harding coined the acronym SLOAP, referring to Spaces Left Over After Planning as forgotten zones within the planning grid and its classification of space from dross to purpose, and therefore value. Scales of urban value too small to be registered or deliberately left to compost for further capturing do not have a clear taxonomy, despite being the leftover products of activities of larger scale.
This event aims at looking again at the conceptual scope, mythology of otherness and real opportunities, to be found in between the symbolic archive of Matta-Clark’s ‘Fake Estates’, the various typologies of occupation and art-based initiatives in Detroit.
This is where a whole politics of interstitial and empty spaces in between art practice, occupation, abandonment and recuperation exists beyond planning and the ultimate monetization of urban space.
For more information click here.
