BARC0064_Hannah

Artistic Intervention Uncovers the Absences of Somers Town

ChihHan, Liu

Art interventions generate interaction, creating new understandings through engagement and subsequent evaluation, using these insights to dismantle established cognition or revisit forgotten absences.

Somers Town, an ancient island compressed between two major transport hubs, possesses its own cultural.

Compared to its developed, comfortable roads, alleys from the 1870s silently witness their surroundings and the destroyed, rebuilt, and deceased buildings, embodying an unsettling city underside. The alleys’ fences declare boundaries of safety and time, akin to canyon gaps within this basin island, reflecting Somers Town’s microcosm of closure and timelines.

Three art interventions utilized varying scales and media to act from a first-person perspective, fostering interactions that sought voices beyond authoritative knowledge. Emphasis shifted from the works themselves to the dialogues and subsequent effects they generated. Contained in specific times and places, freezing daily spaces were gradually dissolving in urban reform. First-person perspectives are projected onto objective spaces, allowing third parties to see and let them feel they are on the screen. In the act of watching and being watched, intertwined dialogues emerge.

Efforts to extract stories from the island’s cracks transcended time, space, storytellers’ intentions, and participants’ identities. People left unreadable messages on the poster, yet most were ultimately destroyed. Through social platforms, jump out of firstperson dailiness to become the fourth wall, crossing frames into other perspectives. Artistic intervention invited social participation to evoke the extraordinary in daily life and absent urban spaces, questioning whether idealized visions, like HS2’s 375 projects in Somers Town, truly engage residents’ daily lives or remain external dialogues.

Maskell, 2024

ROMILLY, 2021

High Speed Two, 2025

The Power of (In)visible S o m e r s To w n A C T S Halfway to the Sun 2023 Community. 2021 2022 Katharina Fitz ‘Shoreline’, T h e P h o e n i x R o a d Workshop led by Climate 2021. Photo by Ewan Kerr P e r f o r m i n g G a r d e n s b y Art and David Rickard in NOOMA Studio collaboration with Think & Do Camden. Photographs by Siobhan Bradshaw.

Luke Raphael Andrew ‘The Old Earth Cantos’ 2021

Bethany Ellen Walker ‘Transition’, ‘Connection’, ‘Reflection’, 2021

Scale Artistic

Projection

Po

Time

Night

Day

Place

Entrance

A

oster

Social media

ytime

Anytime

lley

Network

Use buildings as carriers. Projections onto the building’s skin reveal hidden histories, amplify marginalized voices, and foster public dialogue.

These projections recontextualize the architecture, transforming static structures into dynamic spaces of social critique and collective m e m o r y, c o n n e c t i n g a r t , c o m m u n i t y, a n d a c t i v i s m .

Wodiczko, 1988-2001

CLC, 1875

1880

1920

1950

1970

1990

2024

Andrea Luka, 2014

Matta Clark, 1975

Hans Haacke, 1971

Reference List Book Cobbing, B., 2006. Boooook: The Life and Work of Bob Cobbing. London: Writers Forum.

Montmann, N., 2016. Knowledge Beyond Itself: Contemporary Art's Epistemic Politics.

Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Soja, E.W., 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Document Camden Council, n.d. Planning Application 2010/2871/P. Available at: https://camdocs. camden.gov.uk/CMWebDrawer/PlanRec?q=recContainer:%222010/2871/P%22 (Accessed: 6 January 2025).

HS2 Ltd., n.d. Search Current Works: Somers Town, Camden. Available at: https://www. hs2.org.uk/in-your-area/in-your-area-map/search-current-works/?filter=true&addresssearch-input=Somers%20Town,%20Camden,%20Greater%20London,%20England,%20 GBR&locationSearchLatitude=51.527760&locationSearchLongitude=-0.135081&status=all& phase=all&pageNumber=4 (Accessed: 10 January 2025).

Film Meadows, S., 2008. Somers Town [Film]. UK: Big Arty Productions and Mother Vision.

Image Fugitive Images, n.d. I Am Here. Available at: https://www.fugitiveimages.org.uk/projects/ i-am-here/ (Accessed: 8 January 2025).

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, n.d. Krzysztof Wodiczko’s 1988 Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, Restaged. Available at: https://hirshhorn.si.edu/explore/krzysztofwodiczkos-1988-hirshhorn-museum-washington-dc-restaged/ (Accessed: 8 January 2025).

InSite, n.d. Krzysztof Wodiczko. Available at: https://insiteart.org/people/krzysztof-wodiczko (Accessed: 8 January 2025).

London Festival of Architecture, n.d. LFAxCC Open Call: Somers Town Competition.

Available at: https://2022.londonfestivalofarchitecture.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ LFAxCC-Open-Call-Somers-town-Competition-V3-1.pdf (Accessed: 8 January 2025).

Powell, A., 2021. 'How Krzysztof Wodiczko makes famous monuments come alive', Harvard Gazette, 22 November. Available at: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/11/howkrzysztof-wodiczko-makes-famous-monuments-come-alive/ (Accessed: 8 January 2025).

Roberts, D.J., n.d. Estate. Available at: https://davidjamesroberts.com/performance/estate/ (Accessed: 8 January 2025).

Saltz, J., 2024. 'Hans Haacke’s Art', The New York Times, 16 September. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/t-magazine/hans-haacke-art.html (Accessed: 8 January 2025).

Trebuchet Magazine, n.d. 'The Power of Invisible Community'. Available at: https://www. trebuchet-magazine.com/the-power-of-invisible-community/ (Accessed: 8 January 2025).

Whitney Museum of American Art, n.d. Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971. Available at: https://whitney.org/collection/ works/29487 (Accessed: 8 January 2025).

It is recommended to read it as a book on ISSUU https://issuu.com/chihhanliu/docs/design_portfoliohannah

Appendices