Activation workshop by Monica Sand and Ricardo Atienza, in the Archives, Art and Activism: Exploring Critical Heritage Approaches to Global Societal Challenges, symposium 3-5 September 2015, at University College London (UCL), in collaboration with Critical Heritage Studies at the University of Gothenburg.
The activation during the symposium staged an urban public situation connected to the UCL-site. As a preparation we listened, walked with open senses, and using our voices for exploring some of the passages on the site. With our voices and other expressions we thus re-activated the historical market from the musical piece Cries of London produced by Orlando Gibbons 1620 and the contemporary/future market as described in the policy document: UCL 2034. A new 20-year strategy for UCL (www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-2034). The activation staged the transformation of the ‘market’ from materiel products to fulfil daily needs into abstract products of ‘future education/knowledge’ and its yet unknown reasons.
Photo and editing: Natalia Kouneli. Photo: Linda Sternö.
In this activation/workshop we invited the participants to “play the space” using resonance as an experimental site-specific method. How and with what means are we able to respond to architecture and to (public) space? In terms of response-ability we try out and explore relations in a dialogue between bodies and space. Resonance occurs in time as the immaterial, continuous and elusive expressions of life; in movements and rhythms of social content and meaning. This on-going communication between the audible/visible, past/present, fiction/facts, matter/ language, respond to, express and influence our common social ground and activate memory and associations. The workshop builds on research and activations conducted at the University of Gothenburg within Critical Heritage Studies, wherein we collectively approached excluded urban art history through a set of creative time-based corporeal site-specific processes of walking, resonance, re-activations and re-actions, along with studies of archival material. By walking in the steps of Rubicon, a pioneering independent dance group inaugurated in 1978 we collectively returned to some of the places where the group performed.
Bios for Sand and Atienza here.
Playing the space 