What would McGyver do with tape? Probably he would save the world from a disaster. Instead, New York based artist Aakash Nihalani makes it his paintbrush to draw on the street. Using tape he builds geometric shapes, mainly isometric rectangles and squares, in order to show us the hidden geometry of the city, and of course to give it a touch of color and surprise.
His illusionistic, fluorescent drawings pop up from walls, sidewalks and windows, crawling upon the city’s structures and shapes, playing with any scenario which got chosen.

The great interaction between tape and its framework doesn’t end up within the city corners, involving people as well in the role of actors and part of the whole composition. Finding one of these installations is a face to face with the hacked side of the city, the one where street artists play and urban actors, like Aakash Nihalani, show us their truth, and that is probably why he points out that “people need to understand that how it is isn’t how it has to be”. He explains his work in this video, have a look!

Images taken from www.aakashnihalani.com

Lego will fix our broken bricks

By francescovedovato

October 31, 2010

Urban Interventions

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Two weeks ago, we took part to a workshop leaded by Jan Vormann, artist and creator of Dispatchwork, a nice, colored urban “hacking” practice which consists in filling holes in stone or brick-made wall with hundreds of lego bricks. It was a nice afternoon and we had the chance to talk a bit with the artist about this practice. He came to know very well the pieces he handles and can easily fix whatever kind of hole he finds with a fine, superior technique. It is interesting to notice (or maybe to remember) how much craftsmanship these small bricks need to be wisely combined, but it is even more to learn how to interface them with reality.

Building worlds made entirely out of lego is a reminiscence of our childhood but using them to “fix” wall in a urban hacking practice sounds kind of more grown-up game, maybe closer to contemporary street art practices, but in a reversible way, since legos can in any moment be removed, dismantled and turn back to their original shape. That is why we believe it is an of course more ephemeral, but also somehow less arrogant technique, to color and play with the city.

Photos by The G. Canyon in a Crack

We thank Jan Vormann for the time he spent sharing with us his art and his technique.

Street Art Movie Fever

By annatriboli

October 21, 2010

Street Art

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“Mr. Brainwash is a force of nature, he’s a phenomenon. And I don’t mean that in a good way.” With these words, the universally known street artist Banksy promoted in 2008 the first solo exhibition of Mr Brainwash. After seeing the movie Exit through the gift shop, we could not agree more with what he said. Once heard the story we came out astonished about Mister Brainwash’ ability, but not the one for making art, but for his extremely delicate taste for business. Not bad for a “mentally ill person with a camera” (cit. by Banksy). We tried not to write about this movie because too many people already did, but in the end we gave up, because the show was very nice.

Exit through the gift shop is a documentary about the strange evolutions in the life of a french filmmaker: Thierry Guetta, who found himself to be, all of a sudden, a famous street artist. The story provides an overview of the street art panorama, including some of its most popular protagonists, like Space Invaders, Shepard Fairey (we’re partial to his amazing work), and mainly Banksy, director of the movie.

As we read, the documentary wants to launch a critique towards the actually market-driven street art world, as the title underlines, but this critical vein is not what we noticed first. We were indeed much more involved by the funny story of Thierry, a character who would amaze any director without needing to act.

Even if we usually don’t freak out for him, it is time to give Banksy a chance, so please get out through the gift shop.

Later, we found online the complete documentary Beautifull Losers. Another story and another style. Maybe not that much fireworks but the same good feeling.

Gold Lion to Serbia

By annatriboli

September 17, 2010

Art, Design

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For some strange, lucky reasons, I manage to get into the opening of the XII International Architecture Exposition of the Venice Biennale 2010. Outside shiny models and drawings, in between the non-architectonical offer (which remains the most friendly to me), I got impressed by the nice work presented by the serbian pavilion, which possessed a special, playful ability, to involve people in its game.

Under the direction of the curator Jovan Mitrović, pavillion of Serbia shows two different installations, ideas of the collective Škart, born in 1990 at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade.

The first one, See-saw Play-Grow, chooses the see-saw to explain the concept of architecture as a meeting place (the main theme of the whole Biennale): the see-saw teaches a child to relate with the others, since it doesn’t work if you use it alone.

The second project, Plant-o-biles, was conceived starting from these few verses, written by the serbian poet Vasko Popa:

My wife who I would do anything for

Told me once

I would like to have
A small green tree
That would run after me
down the street

The installation consists in a series of simple objects mounted on wheels, carrying soil, plants and flowers. The nice mobile disposals create a sort of little garden moving in old pots, which is supposed to be carried by people, promoting a sign of friendship with nature.

Photos by Christian Bonin

Plant-o-biles reminds us other similar projects, like Moving Forest of NL Architects or Mobile Garden of the artist Tattfoo Tan, which we already discussed here.
For sure Serbia won our gold lion.

We like trash

By annatriboli

September 11, 2010

Street Art

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In may 2010, in Amsterdam, the garbage collectors decided to strike, in order to protest against the low salaries. The result of their action were streets full of trash bags and a postcard city transformed into an open air dump. In this circumstances, art took part in the city life, rendering the trash into something original and concealing its typical ugliness with a colored show. The artist Jesse Limmen decided to give a touch of color to the rubbish hills painting them with spray cans and creating an unusual splash of colors.

Images taken from http://web.me.com/jlimmen/Site/Kleuren_-_Vuilnis.html

It is interesting to notice that, not so far away, in Spain, in the city of Barcelona, lives an artist who uses garbage as the raw material of his art. Francisco de Pajaro uses the everyday rubbish found on the street to create particular and colored art works: he puts together pieces of different things (from old tables to doors, from monitors to refrigerators, from shoes to chairs, but also suitcases, simple cardboard boxes or garbage bags) and he draws on them, paints or writes his thoughts. Most of the times we can recognize his work for a small text which goes together with the work and says “El arte es basura”, literally “Art is trash”. In technical words it is true, his art is trash, but in a larger meaning this approach to art is, we believe, what is most far from trash. The tough message he leaves us suddenly reveals the strong, deep meaning of making art out of garbage, claiming without shame the origins (and the end) of his work to the frivolous mood of the more touristic streets, often far from the reality of the City.

Images taken from http://www.franciscodepajaro.net/2009/11/el-arte-es-basura.html

The green side of plastic

By annatriboli

September 6, 2010

Urban Interventions

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It is always nice to discover an original guerrilla gardening project: Head Gardner, created by Anna Garfort, turns milk plastic bottles into funny colored faces and re-uses them as boxes for plants. The bottles are then hanged up on street lamps or road signs. We believe it is a cool, alternative way to bring some green in our cities.

The artist uses to work with natural material, such as tree leaves or moss, and she integrates her art passion with urban ecology and sustainability, creating green ephemeral installations mostly in public spaces. As an example, we can mention the projects Change and Rethink, in which she sends messages writing on railings with thorns and fallen leaves. She makes our streets speak through natural and living elements: this is what we call a nice, accessible way to make art.

Images taken from www.crosshatchling.co.uk/

Oak Beach

By annatriboli

August 16, 2010

Art

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In the contemporary scene of installation and urban art, the polish artist NeSpoon creates with her work a winner mix of street art and traditional pottery and embroidery techniques. The project Oak Beach, an original intervention on natural environment takes its name, she said, from her favorite place on the Baltic sea, were she used to go every summer.

What she does in this context is trying to introduce her art in a particular place crowded with memories, using laces not as a stencil – as she usually does – but creating installations on raw objects found on the beach: carefully constructed compositions are tied between the branches of pieces of tree trunks. By doing this, she’s moving installations outside the usual art theatre, looking for interaction with bathers on the beach. She explains that “Many people took pictures of the installations, they moved them around from place to place, they were even used for the construction of beach camps. Kids played around them and with them.”

We believe that, once this level of interaction is achieved, it can show which is the living nature and the real aim of a motionless installation.

Images taken from http://www.behance.net/gallery/Oak-Beach/599056

Instant sofas, flying seeds & plastic burrs

By francescovedovato

July 28, 2010

Design

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Let’s open another little retrospective to explain a project we believe could be an ancestor of the modern Seed Bomb, a common practice of Guerrilla Gardening, which we already described in this post.

The project is part of a wider collection, Eco Redux, which is the name given to an archive collecting “architectural” projects and thinkings which appeared in the 60′s and 70′s, from sketches to more complex manuals, mainly trying to redefine the notions of “shelter” and “habitat”. Some of them are maybe just fashionable “anti-buildings”, as Peter Cook of Archigram thought about many projects of those years described as a “conglomeration of environmental elements”. But we believe we can see an effort to propose experimental techniques that go beyond architecture and design, to reach the level of performances or installations, mainly for the radical connection between materials and time, in a dynamic use of the succesive stages of formation.

As an example, we can bring the Chesterfield Armchair (1964-65) or the Grow Your Own Furniture (1973, recently reproposed in this version)

But what we would expecially like to bring to your attention is a project named Artificial Burrs, from the designers James Harold and Jolan Truan. In 1968, they invented a foldable small biodegradable plastic structure imitating the “hook mechanism” of particular kinds of seeds. These objects are capable of combining in order to create a dam of vegetation through time thanks to seeds and an hydrotropic nutrient solution spread over their surface.

The original goal for which this particular design was achieved was stopping the erosion cycle in arid areas through aerial distribution of the macroseeds, a practice already known since 1930. But what we suggest is considering this object as an earlier prototype of the modern Seed Bomb, which included also few intresting design characteristics like the hooks and the folding structure, that would maybe be interesting to re-propose in the current practice of Guerrilla Gardening.

Images taken from the Eco Redux archive

Flying graffiti

By annatriboli

July 27, 2010

Street Art

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Evolution is what we believe in. So, when an artist changes the level with his or her work, refusing to crystalize it in a motionless reality, we are happy to let you know. The italian artist Moneyless managed to evolve, and that’s why we want to spend few words about him.

He chose his name because of his behavior, far – he lets us know – from the contemporary consumerism, and because he wants to express his need of simple life an essential values, also in his art. He explains that “the poverty of a simple shape is a true richness, because it represents the silence that makes thoughts come to light”.
Moneyless started his career as a writer, but then letters became for him like a strait-jacket and were paralyzing his creativity. So he changed his way of working, but keeping a special care to his main subject: geometric shapes, the centre of his research. Sometimes similar to russian Suprematism and Constructivism of the first twenty years of the XX century, his work gives importance to abstract shapes, “showing ideas of reality” – as he describes them-. The project that draws our attention is called Flying Graffiti. When he started to make art – he tells us – he used to consider only two dimensions, drawing on walls, paper, canvas or wood. But in this last project he discovered the third dimension, creating geometric solids flying in the air. He does it using strings or wool threads supported by nails and transparent nylon cable. In this way his drawings ‘jump’ off the background and start to float in the space, revealing us their tri-dimensional souls.

What is also interesting is the location of the works: moneyless chooses for his installations natural environment, like woods, or places in decay, like abandoned factories. The contrast between the location and the work makes his solids jump out even more: we’re in front of artificial, perfectly crafted shapes, located into a non-controlled environment, this produces in us a strange feeling, like a wrong piece of a puzzle. Moneyless explains that “these shapes can melt or do camouflage in these kind of sites (their background, ndr), but they always remain a stranger, an outstanding element. So, to found ourselves in these structures take us in ‘another place’ “.
We couldn’t agree more, we’re indeed playing with two realities, and we like the game.

Images taken from http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=683415323&v=box_3#!/teomoneyless

Thanks to Moneyless for his precious help.

Ruhr reloaded

By annatriboli

July 21, 2010

Architecture, Art, Design

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The city of Essen, this year’s nominee as the European Capital of Culture, decided to take advantage of its position to start a radical change in the Rhur, the region where it is located in Germany. Essen for the Rhur 2010 is the name of the program, which aims is to create a new metropolis in Europe, the Rhur Metropolis: no more old an abandoned industrial areas, but art and culture centres instead.

Their slogan is “Change through Culture - Culture through Change!”, as to say, they want to transform the largest coal mine in Europe into a lively district through culture and art: for this aim, three hundreds projects will be realized in various cities and towns of the zone.

An example is Still life A40: the 18th of july a lunch event was organized on the highway 40 (the most intensively used highway in Europe), which stayed close all day long to celebrate the everyday culture of the Ruhr through music, food and performances.

Image taken from www.essen-fuer-das-ruhrgebiet.ruhr2010.de

Image taken from flickr.com/photos/gerd_burchard/

Another project is the Shaft Sign, made with balloons marking the spots of former coal-mines.

Images by WAZ FotoPool (Manfred Vollmer), taken from www.essen-fuer-das-ruhrgebiet.ruhr2010.de

But the most interesting project is the Light Ruhr 2010: artists, architects and designers created light installations in different places of the Ruhr, in order to show in a very visible (and visual) way the ongoing change of the area. Some of the works are installed into the coal mines, transformed into rich and lively public spaces, like in the Landschaftpark in Duisburg Nord, but also in other sites with a different quality of space like the Zentrum für Internationale LichtKunst in Unna.

Image taken from http://www.flickr.com/photos/34408161@N04/

Image taken from flickr.com/photos/everglade10/

The Landschaftpark in Duisburg Nord was an old steel and coal mine abandoned in 1985, then transformed between 1991 and 1999 into a landscape park by the architects Peter Latz+Partner. The new transformations create a strange relationship between industrial archeology, art and landscape, which looks charming and fascinating to our eyes.