Deborah True Matias Viegener, Dave Burns & Austin Young Peter Bond Ayssar Arida Johnny Golding

Rosa Ainley Philippa Beale Helen Kerwan & Jane Madsen Eileen Simpson Sarah Ross

Street manifestos - Towards an Editorial

An accelerating process of urbanisation has been a key feature of modern existence since the industrial revolution. Half the global population now live in an urban environment and about 160,000 people per day are moving to the city to join them (1). In the developed world of Western Europe and the US, rural cultures scarcely exist as transport, media and communication technologies have pulled those living in even the remotest regions into an urban economy and culture. The dynamism and speed of urban experience is rapidly becoming the global experience.

Urban expansion has been driven by the constant influx of migrants, fresh arrivals who are confronted by the demands and protocols of city life at the same time contributing to the acceleration of the fluxes and flows of the city. The migrant’s fate is uncertain; some are welcomed, many are not; witness the current tabloid rant against economic immigrants and asylum seekers.

The instability of the proliferating metropolis is marked by the transformation of place into space and the citizen into a prodigal tourist, perpetually nomadic, homeless, ‘out of place’ (2). The deterritorialised city zone where identity is grasped only as loss, longing and absence, is also where creative production takes flight and fresh subversive desires emerge.

The city where space, place and time are multiple, fragmented, where memories and history are folded into a present, incessantly becoming, accelerating towards the future.

It is on the streets where inequalities of power are witnessed and confronted. City centres created by the energy of diversity and difference are falling under the homogenising force of corporate finance generating both residential and retail developments that eliminate public, municipal space seeking to exclude the poor and the dissenting.

The historic divide between the country and the city is now largely imaginary even mythical as it is reconfigured globally as a relationship between the metropol and the margins, with potentially catastrophic social and ecological consequences. Urban expansion at its current rate and form is unsustainable:

‘ London’s ecological footprint, for example, considering only its consumption of food and forest products, and the area needed to assimilate its emissions of carbon dioxide, is calculated to be 125 times greater than the area of the city itself. (3)

The creation of the sustainable city is inseparable from the conservation and sustainable development of the rural environment and ecological diversity.

In the extended global metropolis the image of the war torn city dominates the media from the planes flying into the twin towers to the destruction of cities in Palestine and Iraq as the US and its allies wage war on the developing world under the guise of ‘The War on Terrorism’. On the streets human rights are being suspended in the name of security and citizens are displaced and dispossessed.

Street manifestos: Editorial Part II - The Contents

The contributors to this issue have responded to the first section of this editorial which was emailed to networks of writers, designers and artists across the world.

Lebanese Urban Designer and Architect Ayssar Arida was about to write his piece for OE3, when the assassination of Rafiki Hariri sent Beirut into a state of crisis. This momentous event instantly threw up the spectre of Beirut as war-torn city at the epicentre of the civil war of 1975-1990. Ayssar's response was to offer his vision of the reconstruction of Beirut's Martyr's Square, originally submitted as a proposal to an international design ideas competition.

The proposal draws on the approach to urban development that Ayssar put forward in his ground breaking book Quantum City. Quantum City offers a vision of urbanism based on an inter-play between quantum theory, urban design and the concept of the city. The complexities of contemporary urban experience often marginalized by urban planners are fore grounded calling for an architecture that respects the multiplicity of communities, histories and worldviews.

Philosopher - artist Johnny Golding , writes a statement that chimes with Ayssar's quantum city vision "Perhaps I want to re-write this 'event' as violence; its projection: memory; its fleeting recognition: installation."

It's a wonderful life (1) explores the complex dynamics of inhabiting, 'being there', the installation in each fleeting moment of an urban existence. Johnny's insights are offered as the rules of a deadly game, a manifesto and a trans-disciplinary guidebook to our accelerating journeys in the Post post-modern world we now inhabit as the homeless. This piece draws on the ideas explored in Johnny's book, Dirty Theory and a number of recent moving image pieces.

I guess unsurprisingly maps make a frequent appearance in OE3. The emphasis here though is consistently on the act of mapping or remapping the city.

Matias Viegener with fellow collaborators, David Burns and Austin Young map their Los Angeles neighbourhood Silver Lake locating sources of Fallen Fruit. Behind this witty and ironic performance piece lie serious issues of public and private space, ownership and urban planning. At the same time exploring the fractured relationship between country and city and the dietary deficiencies of American citizens.

For artist Deborah True in her installation Mapping with Threads the map is a palimpsest where the migrating communities of garment workers that have flowed through London's Spitalfields have constantly re-inscribed and re-woven the city. A two-dimensional map is composed of tailor's pattern symbols; simultaneously a flow diagram of garment production and a tracking of the movements of migrating communities. The dynamic is shifted into three dimensional mapping with an installation of the materials of production: pattern tissue and threads as a matrix of human relations.

Artist Sarah Ross moves through the streets of Los Angeles exploring public space through a ubiquitous item of street furniture: the bench. Documentation of a series of interactive performances with street benches positions and configures the body in public space, opening another genre of urban anthropology.

Cities as nodes on a global network of connections, journeys and migrations is a re-occurring theme in OE3.

Artist, writer and curator, Philippa Beale in Up from the Country, intertwines her own migration to the city with the development and documentation of her art work. These are journeys that references contemporary art practice to the changing face of the urban environment.

Writer/artist Rosa Ainley in Design for Waiting Room explores the time-space trajectory of waiting, the delay in the propulsion from the present to the future that is air travel. The recently re-branded Kent International Airport is explored through a montage of texts, sound and images. The site is figured as a non-place demanding a new urban anthropology to tease-out the complexities of the event of waiting.

(Performance) artist and writer Peter Bond in Attitude Rendering the Town and Country Dialectic Through Performativity, performs his journey as flâneur aboard a London bus. His route takes many detours via Walter Benjamin, Frederick Jameson, Franko B and Banksy as it journeys between the city and the country.

Helen Kirwan and Jane Madsen in FOOTPRINTS have installed artefacts that are the residue (like used tickets) of a critical/creative response to both the Venice Biennale 2003 and the City of Venice as staged art events. This project was originally commissioned and presented by the dept. of Architecture & Urban Planning(ASK), Ghent University.

Folded into the OE3 installation is an itinerary that records journeys between London, Kent, Belgium and Venice that were both essential to the production process and a performed component of the project. The itinerary mutates into a series of diagrammatic compositions, enigmatic codes as compelling and elusive as the imaginary city of Venice.

Artist Eileen Simpson's Establishing the shot focuses on the re-occurring opening sequence in mainstream movies linking cinema to the city. Along with the locating cutaway the establishing shot of the city offers the spectator an engagement with meanings outside the obvious narrative space and action.

(1) UN statistics – UNEP Geo–2000 Global Environmental Outlook – www.unep.org/geo2000
(2) from Edward Said’s use of ‘out of place’ as a state of exile from the homeland, Said E. Out of Place: A Memoir
(3) ibid

James Swinson is a film, video and installation artist and is a lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design.