Artistic Intervention Uncovers the Absences of Somers Town
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.
The Power of (In)visible Community. 2021
Somers Town ACTS 2022
Halfway to the Sun 2023
Katharina Fitz ‘Shoreline’, 2021. Photo by Ewan Kerr
The Phoenix Road Performing Gardens by NOOMA Studio
Workshop led by Climate Art and David Rickard in collaboration with Think & Do Camden. Photographs by Siobhan Bradshaw.
Luke Raphael Andrew ‘The Old Earth Cantos’ 2021
Bethany Ellen Walker ‘Transition’, ‘Connection’, ‘Reflection’, 2021
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 memory, connecting art, community, and activism.
Reference List
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Document
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