In July 2009 The Showroom became host to one of 32 objects circulating the world as part of Ricardo Basbaum’s project Would you like to participate in an artistic experience? The object debuted at the Church Street Festival on 12 July 2009 initiating the gallery’s pilot programme titled Communal Knowledge. These collaborative projects aim to generate playful and experimental avenues for critical reflection on issues at stake in The Showroom’s neighbourhood.

Over the last three months artists from the surrounding area and further afield were invited by The Showroom, to realize their own micro works with the object. An additional criteria was added to Ricardo’s rules for participation, whereby each project should somehow relate to the local area. Eight artists responded to the call with a range of diverse and imaginative proposals.

In a playful response to the object, Flora Bradwell and Lily Hall devised a modern interpretation of the classic seaside photo board, using the shape of the object as the backdrop and historical figures associated with Church Street and Edgware Road as the painted front. Members of the public were invited to place their face into the painting and strike a pose.
Flora Bradwell and Lily Hall are a new creative partnership instigating interactive, collaborative, and site-specific projects.

‘The object to us meant something that had travelled through many different hands, an object full of social contacts’.

Playing with the notion of the object as a vessel for everyday experience, artists Hans and Joao took to the streets with the object filled with water, reinscribing the ritual of baptism as a tongue-in-cheek intervention.
Hans Diernberger is an artist based in London and Germany and Joao Noro Caldeira is an artist based is London and Portugal. Both are currently participating on the MFA Art Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London.

‘Community Object Mold’ presents a series of absurd schematic diagrams and audio collages charting conversations between the artist and local vendors around Church Street. Each conversation was lead by the search for wares from the local commercial community that might physically fit together to fill the space inside the object. Daniel Lichtman produces visual art and public programs that investigate the relationship between language and history, memory and politics.

‘It’s not like an auditorium’ is a project that utilises the memorable shape of the object to inform and constrain the proposal of a theatrical production. Technical plans of the Cockpit Theatre in Church Street are merged with an outline of the object providing a structure that guides the artists’ interaction with the theatre’s locality. A video work shows several performers rehearsing texts made up of transcripts of conversations with local people and material from Westminster Archives. The collection of fragments and clips also includes a proposed stage set for the imagined production produced by Jane Fawcett that consists of a slideshow of images projected onto gauze.

Will Saunders is an artist based in London who works with musicians and voice in order to explore notions of urban space. Jane Fawcett’s collaborative work reflects on images and the experience of viewing images, through videos and installations.

Michele Louise Schiocchet explores the object as a connector of people and places. Based on the idea of the palimpsest, the memory of the object is activated through new interactions, re-imprinted or re-projected onto the body of the object. The overlapping spatialities aim to create open narratives that are accumulated in layers. Michele Louise Schiocchet’s artistic practice takes up the hidden narratives of space. She is based in London and Brazil.

“My experiment with the NBP is a sort of work in progress, where I am trying to engage with spatialities, communicating spaces and people through the manipulation of traces. My present research is an interdisciplinary practice based project that explores also the possibilities of portraying everyday life; investigating conceptually and practically, creative interactions with everyday life spaces.

The city is seen as a site of transformation where a mesh is created between present and past occupations (Soja 2000: 137), being the space marked and organized with a net of signs, created by the ideological system. (Castells 1977: 126-7 in Soja 2000: 161).

For Manuel de Castells, there is no possible division between reality and production of symbols, due to the symbolic character of cultures: ´All the symbols result in something displaced in relation with its assigned semantic meaning. In a certain sense, all the reality is perceived virtually.´ (Castells 2001: 47)

Images could influence the interpretation of the everyday. A. Schlottmann and J. Miggelbrink affirm that more than reflecting or representing a space or a ‘reality’, they are interfaces of their constitution (A. Schlottmann & J. Miggelbrink 2009)

David Harvey introduces the idea of palimpsest pointing that the contemporary city is formed by several layers, overlapping traces of different generations.

The interaction with the city’s palimpsest is a tactical attempt to revert the relationship of dominance and creating narratives traced by the individuals themselves. ‘The approach to culture begins when the ordinary man becomes the narrator, when it is he who defines the (common) place of discourse and the (anonymous) space of its development.’ (Certeau 1984: 5).

The analysis and development of practical work is useful to evaluate how aesthetic choices could conceptually influence the development and perception of an artwork; selecting features such as possible mediums and aesthetics, to be applied practically (constantly) rephrasing our inquiries.

My research started through a video installation/ urban interventions called Urban Fragments (available on: http://vimeo.com/channels/63610), investigating: ‘How fragments of urban experiences can virtually and geographically dialogue?’ The work was based on “walks”, exploring interactions with urban palimpsests and the creation of ‘walking narratives’.

Inhabiting simultaneously several spaces, an individual could engage differently with
each part of a trajectory, producing simultaneous narratives and layers of interpretation.
These layers accumulate stories, converting constantly from sign to space (experience),
being the meaning not contained in any surface but between them all and the act of
looking. I am locating the focus of the project on the connections between subject portrayed, portrait and the act of portraying, exploring overlaps and interdependencies.

Promoting a playful communication and stimulating a reflexive positioning towards the everyday practices, we can maybe re-propose fragments of spaces that hopefully as Benjamin suggest: ‘not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening.’ (Benjamin 2008: 109)”

My experience with the NBP is not yet finalized, as I aim to conclude with a short video which is still in the process of being edited. When ready it will be posted on: http://vimeo.com/channels/63610