The Imagined City was a year-long public programme of talks and events curated by Household in 2016 that considered the role of art and artists in urban environments.
As part of Belfast City Council’s City as a Gallery initiative, in partnership with PLACE (Planning Landscape Architecture Community Environment), Household invited artists Paddy Bloomer, Charlotte Bosanquet, Colin Darke, and Aideen Doran and researcher James Houston to imagine public artworks tracing a route from West to East Belfast on The Imagined City bus tour.
Living & Working Economies: Artists in the City was an afternoon of talks by Kamiel Vershuren, artist and founder of the NAC Foundation, and Jon Wakeman, director of East Street Arts, at the artist-led space Lawrence Street Workshops. Together with our invited speakers and audience, we examined how artists can establish new ecologies for living and working in cities by looking at relationships between space, geography and urban renewal.
International to Local: UK Case Studies considered radical artistic, curatorial and institutional approaches to working internationally but remaining embedded locally. Presented at the Ormeau Park Bowling Green in South Belfast, the talks programme included contributions from Alistair Hudson, Director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, and Sarah McCrory, Director of Glasgow International and a Q&A.
Household and other members of the art sector joined Claire Doherty, Director of Situations – the Bristol-based organisation dedicated to commissioning and producing imaginative new forms of public art – for Behind the Scenes: Commissioning Public Art, a Public Art Masterclass and public conversation at the Duncairn Arts Centre in North Belfast.
The Imagined City was delivered in partnership with Belfast City Council. The research and findings resulting from this programme were incorporated into a report that included sector-specific recommendations.
The Imagined City
The Imagined City – Behind the Scenes: Commissioning Public Art, 2016: Members of the sector joined Household at Duncairn Centre for Culture and the Arts in North Belfast for a Public Art Masterclass with Claire Doherty, Director of Situations, the Bristol-based organisation dedicated to commissioning and producing imaginative new forms of public art. Those present included dozens of representatives from across the sector: creative practitioners (artists, writers, poets); academics (from visual arts and film departments); funders (Belfast City Council, Arts Council Northern Ireland, Dublin City Council); organisations (Catalyst Arts, Ulster University, Artists Moving Image Northern Ireland; Platform; Pollen, Flax); independent curators and producers. Claire gave examples of ambitious and successful Situations projects in the public realm and spoke of partnerships and collaborations with commissioners, funders and local authority. In addition to Claire sharing her experience, those in attendance were encouraged to contribute their responses throughout her presentation and in the open discussion that was the focus of the second half of the Masterclass.
The Imagined City – International to Local: UK Case Studies, 2016: A day of talks held at the Ormeau Park Bowling Green that considered radical artistic, curatorial and institutional approaches to working internationally but remaining embedded locally. Speakers included Alistair Hudson, Director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima), and Sarah McCrory, Director of Glasgow International art festival. Those present included representatives from across the sector: creative practitioners (artists, writers, poets); academics (from visual arts, architecture and film departments); funders (Belfast City Council); organisations (The MAC, Catalyst Arts, Ulster University, Artists Moving Image Northern Ireland, Platform, Pollen, Flax, Golden Thread Gallery); independent curators and producers. The talk, and Q&A following the presentations in which the audience participated, highlighted the importance of institutions in profiling cities, creating infrastructure, supporting local work, and securing international reputations.
The Imagined City – International to Local: UK Case Studies, 2016: Events such as Glasgow International not only give local and international artists the opportunity to generate and exhibit ambitious new work but also create transformative experiences for other people living and working in city spaces, making them culturally confident and more responsive citizens. During her presentation, Glasgow International Director Sarah McCrory spoke of her work for the festival, a Glasgow City Council funded initiative. She described how the festival has grown year after year with local authority support and through ongoing conversation with the council. She highlighted the fact that the festival always shows cutting edge contemporary art and presents quality thematic programming in partnership with other organisations across the city. With every iteration, there is significant investment in commissioning new work from Scottish and international artists and thanks to this the festival has developed a critically acclaimed international profile. She spoke of the economic benefits of having a high profile visual arts festival in Glasgow and presented some of the financial figures from the inaugural festival in 2010 to 2016.
The Imagined City – International to Local: UK Case Studies, 2016: For the last decade, Alistair Hudson was the Deputy Director of Grizedale Arts in the Lake District, an organisation which gained critical acclaim for its radical approaches to working with artists and communities, based on the idea that art should be useful and not just an object of contemplation. Hudson was appointed as Director of Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art in October 2014. In his talk in Belfast, Alistair presented his much-discussed approach to programming at mima. He stated that the passive role of the art and the art institution is completely redundant and that art and the institutions that support and present it should above all be useful and strive to be embedded within the local. His vision for mima is based on the concept of the ‘Useful Museum’, an institution dedicated to the promotion of art as a tool for education and social change. The museum and its contents are formed and shaped by its users and it exists as a project or tool.
The Imagined City – Living & Working Economies: Artists in the City, 2016: Members of the creative and housing sectors joined Household at Lawrence Street Workshops in South Belfast for formal presentations and a discussion about alternative economic models for artists living and working in cities. Speakers included Kamiel Verschuren, founder of the NAC Foundation, Rotterdam; Jon Wakeman, Artistic Director of East Street Arts, Leeds; and Dr Agustina Martire Urquijo, Lecturer in Architecture at Queen’s University, Belfast, who chaired the discussions. Present at the event were people from various professional backgrounds and disciplines: artists, writers, curators, architects (FCB Studios), academics (Queen’s University, Ulster University), property owners (Lawrence Street Workshops), studio managers (FLAX, Platform Arts), and housing organisations (Shelter NI).
The Imagined City – Living & Working Economies: Artists in the City, 2016: Our two international guests, Kamiel Verschuren and Jon Wakeman, arrived in Belfast a few days before the event in order to experience first-hand the reality of the urban landscape that (creative) communities live within in Belfast. In advance of the talks at Lawrence Street Workshops we visited and met with representatives in the following spaces and places: Shelter NI, Flax Studios, The Bath House, Skainos Centre, artist Paddy Bloomer's self-built house, and the Skainos Centre.
The Imagined City – Living & Working Economies: Artists in the City, 2016: During the Living & Working Economies: Artists in the City talks, Kamiel Verschuren delivered a presentation showing the timeline of the development and revitalisation of an area in south Rotterdam, delivered via innovative public art projects and low-cost housing schemes for artists. The south of Rotterdam is considered the poorest area of this city, with a quickly increasing population and rising unemployment rate. It is cut off from the rest of Rotterdam, with physical barriers such as the River Maas as well as social and psychological barriers such as the area’s high, often unintegrated, immigrant population and historically high crime rates. At NAC Foundation, Verschuren has created an alternative economy to employ, fund and house artists in a specific area of Rotterdam. The city’s housing association provides the NAC foundation with rent-free housing in run-down parts of south Rotterdam. Artists and creative practitioners pay a low rental charge to NAC per month to live in these properties, providing NAC with an annual income from approx. 100 rentals. This agreement allows rents to remain low and affordable for artists and creative practitioners but also generates an internal, self-sustaining funding structure. NAC pays the resident artists to undertake the renovations of their respective rented accommodation themselves from the money collected from rents and equates to a substantial annual public investment in the neighbourhood per year. By demonstrating the monetary value of the work carried out, NAC has been able to secure match funding from local government. This income is also used for the MYA fund (Move Your Ass, Mind Your Area), where NAC resident artists can apply for money for their own artistic projects, which must demonstrate some benefit to the local community.
The Imagined City – Living & Working Economies: Artists in the City, 2016: Jon Wakeman, founding member of East Street Arts in Leeds, described how the organisation has grown over 12 years from a temporary art exhibition in a vacant shop to a charitable organisation with 21 staff, an organisational headquarters, seven venues, 90 studio spaces, four project spaces, a 34-bed hostel and one live/work house, located across Leeds. East Street Arts have created a very successful alternative economy to support their artistic community in Leeds. By purchasing properties for studios they avoid paying money (both their own and cultural funding) to private landlords. This also offers security to artists in the city, whose studio groups are often leased under temporary rental agreements and find that the areas they move into are improved directly/made more desirable by the presence of artists, often resulting in them being priced out. East Street received Arts Council, EU, and Leeds City Council funding in order to buy Patrick Studios, a process that took four years. They also run a rates relief scheme, by using their charitable status to exempt landlords from rates when they agree to let East Street use their buildings. Rates relief has been used in Belfast previously by Household to secure temporary residency projects as part of the the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival and the studio group Platform Arts currently have a rates relief agreement enabling them to run their studio group and gallery building on Queen Street. In addition to receiving initial investment from funders, East Street Arts also charge landlords to avail of the rates relief they provide, arguing they are providing a service by not only allowing private property owners to save on rates but also often adding value to the building through renovation and positive use.
The Imagined City – Living & Working Economies: Artists in the City, 2016: Following the talks, Household served refreshments at Lawrence Street Workshops.
For The Imagined City Bus Tour, Household invited artists Paddy Bloomer, Charlotte Bosanquet, Colin Darke, and Aideen Doran to imagine four artworks tracing a route from West to East Belfast.
Working with researcher James Houston, this project took as its starting point the absence of any public transport link connecting these two sides of the city. The participating artists created four speculative audio works investigating the possibilities and impossibilities of this journey. The audio was played to an audience on a bus following the route mapped by the four artists in their works. The Imagined City bus tour positions the artist as navigator and proposes new ways to explore Belfast.
The audio tours can be found below.
The Imagined City Bus Tour, 2016: An Culturlann to the Falls Road murals. Artist Colin Darke presented an impossible performance based on Trout, a painting made in 1872/73 by the artist Gustave Courbet while imprisoned for his involvement in the Paris Commune, a radical socialist and revolutionary government that ruled Paris from 18 March to 28 May 1871. It depicts a trout on the verge of death after being caught by an angler, an apt metaphor for the brief and bloody uprising. Darke’s audio journey bore a direct relation to places along the route running from the Culturlann to the Falls Road murals. He invited us to imagine the Suicide Awareness centre; the Beehive bar; St Mary’s University College; the Royal Victoria Hospital and St Dominic’s Grammar School; the AOH building; Bobby Sands Mural and the Library relief sculptures; the closed Rebel’s Rest bar; the Jobs & Benefits building, Falls Leisure Centre and the Two Spires shops; and the murals as ‘characters’ as his script unfolded. Darke’s text was narrated by Ricki O’Rawe.
The Imagined City Bus Tour, 2016: The Falls Road murals to Castle Street. Artist Paddy Bloomer invited participants to imagine the subterranean infrastructure of Belfast, telling the tale of several attempts to find a route from West to East of the city via drains and culverts (an underground pipe structure) – an almost impossible task in a city built on a bog. Over fifteen years ago, accompanied by his fellow explorer Nicholas Keogh, Bloomer entered Belfast’s underworld via the Blackstaff culvert by the side of the Westlink near the Donegall Road, an entrance which has since been blocked up due to redevelopment. Here they encountered muck, detritus, Willie McCrea vinyl records, potentially poisonous fumes and unimaginable sounds. Wading towards a light at the end of a tunnel beneath what could be Divis flats, they are confronted with a gaze from the city above, the source of which to this day remains a mystery.
The Imagined City Bus Tour, 2016: Wellington Place to Templemore Avenue. Artist Aideen Doran invited listeners to suspend their disbelief completely to envision a dystopian future Belfast as a city submerged – a ruin within a murky lagoon, rich in marine flora and fauna but long vacated by human life. This is an imagined city where asking questions about the potential future for public art is an extraneous exercise. Global warming has reached its inevitable conclusion: sea-levels have risen uncontrollably, the oft-forgotten River Farset has bubbled up from beneath and subsequently swept away High Street, the Lagan has long ago burst its banks, and now, centuries after the Deluge, tourists are taken on subaquatic tours of the area to look for traces of a once-great (but catastrophically short-sighted) ancient civilisation. In this new world, the concept of ‘art’ as we know it, as with the concept of what is ‘public’ has changed so dramatically as to be almost unrecognisable. Doran’s hallucinatory future vision of the city is notably influenced by 1970s science-fiction literature, in particular texts such as J G Ballard’s The Drowned World, where a natural disaster causes a world constructed by mankind to transform into a brutally primitive landscape of unknowable possibilities. Doran’s text was narrated by Bronagh McCrudden.
The Imagined City Bus Tour, 2016: Templemore Avenue to Sydenham train station. Charlotte Bosanquet revisited an idea that she proposed to the art space Satis House in 2012. Her proposal involved building a scaffold on the side of the building (a domestic house) which would remain for the duration of the show, offering a new view of and from the house and that could be used for a range of activities during the exhibition. The terms of this proposal being rejected as a viable exhibition were based on the potential danger it might cause to those visiting it or living in the house. The artist used this example as a starting point to question the increasing limitations imposed upon artworks in the public realm and examine the ever-changing threshold of what is considered a risk and what is considered safe for audiences as they encounter an artwork. Bosanquet’s text was narrated by Elodie Fabre.
Colin Darke: An Culturlann to the Falls Road murals
Paddy Bloomer: The Falls Road Murals to Castle Street
Aideen Doran: Wellington Place to Templemore Avenue
Charlotte Bosanquet: Templemore Avenue to Sydenham train station
The Imagined City and City as a Gallery is funded by Belfast City Council. Special thanks to James Heuston, Ricki O’Rawe,Bronagh McCrudden, Elodie Fabre and PLACE. Programme design by Tom Hughes. Images by Simon Mills.