Festus

Living House/ Body House

Melanie Jackson

A Project with Melanie Jackson, Louise Ashcroft, the Museum of the Home, 575 Wandsworth Road (National Trust), The Wellcome Collection, San Mei Gallery, Van Gogh House and Flat Time House. (12th, 13th, 14th of November)

There will be a series of study trips, a seminar, curators talks and Q and A and a making workshop at Flat Time House (materials provided). Following this you will exhibit the work make in relation to the project, in the Hangar at the RCA. There will be a crit for the group on Wednesday 17th December followed by an opening and drinks in the evening.

We will begin by considering artists who activate the relation of the house and the body, the idea of a ‘living house’ whereby art making and viewing is an embodied durational experience. We will look at ideas that feed into conceptions of a house or housing as a living entity, the circulatory systems and networked status of buildings, and the wider relation of body to architecture and the city.

We will look to artists that play with notions of body in its broadest sense whether it be a body of work, human body, social body – and ways in which the word house may be an active verb as well as a noun. We will also discuss a recent piece of writing that asks us to consider historical constructions of home and homeland in this time of global technocracy, and housing emergency. There will be a making workshop at Flat Time House and an opportunity to further develop this work as a response for the exhibition in December.

SCHEDULE

Tuesday 12th November 12-7pm

A seminar introduction to artists such as Lygia Clarke and Carolee Schneeman, Erwin Wurm, John Latham to Khadambi Asalache who transformed his home into a living artwork. We will bring this right up to the present and look at contemporary artists such as Avril Coroon who incorporate housing precarity and activism in her networked installations and ways in which homes are activated as showing spaces.

Followed by a visit to Museum of the Home, and a special evening opening of 575 Wandsworth Road for RCA sculpture.

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/london/575-wandsworth-road/the-home-and-legacy-of-khadambi-asalache

Wednesday 13th November

11- 5.30pm

Morning visit Wellcome Collection exhibition Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights to consider the impact of work on the body when the home is a place of work. In the afternoon

https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/ZpE1ghAAACQAgRSg?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwsJO4BhDoARIsADDv4vAI0xgoUc6VCtfDB0WbK_FJHl-y-pBxazQZSDjvzjuRnEw8uqgslEcaAtZFEALw_wcB

We will visit San Mei Gallery and Van Gogh House – sister spaces in Brixton that explore the historic house and the gallery as living spaces with series of research projects, interactions and residencies with introductions by the curators. https://www.sanmeigallery.co.uk/exhibitions/sam-ashby-sanctuary https://vangoghhouse.co.uk/cycles/

Thursday 14th November

11 - 5pm (picnic lunch included)

https://flattimeho.org.uk/about/

Flat Time House - a living house, archive and contemporary art space in Peckham.

Introduction to the curator Gareth Bell and workshop with Artists Louise Ashcroft. (all day)

Materials will be provided

What?!

Louise Ashcroft's workshop 'Home Improvements' is an 'ideathon' in which you will rethink the home (Flat Time House) and its appliances to address societal problems and possibilities that you find compelling.

The vibe is 'Black Mirror https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/70264888 meets Speculative Design https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262019842/speculative-everything/ '. We'll make it into a speculative shopping catalogue. What to bring: yourself, a notebook, a pen, and an idea for a problem relating to how we live now.

Why?!!

This year Louise was in a group show called 'Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family' at Kunstmuseum St.Gallen (Switzerland), exhibiting an album of nursery rhyme songs with lyrics based on responses to a questionnaire of childfree/childless people's views on family. Housing came up a lot - it's fundamental to how we live together; architecture is a psychological space, riddled with ideology, societal values and fantasy. What if a group of artists re-imagined the house and its contents? In 2018 Louise made some radio shows about products; this one playfully analyses the cultural context of The Argos Catalogue https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05z4pb5 (a shopping catalogue full of homewares and appliances). In 2022 Louise built a DIY sperm bank outside her terraced house as a provocation to the fertility industry (long story). How might you augment or alter flat time house to change the lives of its inhabitants. You can be surreal, political, serious, weird, funny, smart, stupid, emotional, logical, practical, or none/all of the above...do it your way and let intuitive possibilities unfold. You will prototype your idea in cardboard and present it to the group; we will make a shopping catalogue of the designs.

Keywords: architecture, body, housing, home, homeland, circulation, systems

Optional inspiration to check out beforehand:

Superflux, Uninvited Guests (film) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ear8W-C96bk

Environment Transformers, Haus-Rucker-Co, 1968 (speculative architecture) https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_mind_expander_chair_other_inventions_from_the_far-out

Andrea Zittel https://www.zittel.org/

Rirkrit Tiravanija solar ovens at LUMA https://www.luma.org/en/live/watch/do-we-dream-interview-5ec302ef-b864-4ea0-9f0f-66ba54cf43b0.html

PINK de Thierry https://mediakunst.net/public/pink-de-thierry-living-in-art

Jasleen Kaur (https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/art-and-ideas/on-practice-cooking/ , or https://hollybushgardens.co.uk/files/jasleen-kaur-be-like-teflon.pdf and https://materialmatters.design/Jasleen-Kaur )

Theaster Gates - Dorchester Art and Housing Collaborative (DAHC) https://www.theastergates.com/project-items/dorchester-art-and-housing-collaborative-dahc

Power Station - a solar punk DIY green new deal https://www.power.film/about

and reading:

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/147/621569/planetarization-and-heimatlosigkeit-part-1/ Planetarization and Heimatlosigkeit, Part 1Yuk Hui

Melanie Jackson (UK) is an artist and educator who works with modes of non-fiction storytelling through assemblages of sculpture, writing and moving image. They engage with bio-technologies from the perspective of deep history to future science, at shifting scales between the nano/personal/intimate/ to the gargantuan/social/cosmic. There is a focus on work, plant and animal life and the ways they are inculcated into circulatory systems, often calling out tales of excess and the absurd, and of seeking inventive ways of getting by. They work with tactics of representation that treat the gallery as a stage for experimentation: mimicry, documentary, myth fabrication, science, performance, animation, political commentary, music, installation, craft and the cultivation of aesthetic delight.

Melanie also has a collaborative writing practice with Esther Leslie, most recently a new version of their book Deeper in the Pyramid: Share of Throat was re-printed by Wellcome Collection in 2022.

They have held solo exhibitions in the UK at Aspex, Chapter, San Mei Gallery, Block 336, Grand Union, Primary, Banner Repeater, the Drawing Room, Flat Time House, John Hansard Gallery and Matt’s Gallery. She has exhibited in group shows internationally including at the Wellcome Collection, eva+, Ireland, DRF Biennale, (Osaka, Japan), ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, (Karlsruhe, Germany).

At the RCA they work in the MA Sculpture Programme and with PhD students.

Louise Ashcroft's performances, comedy, videos, writing, community projects, drawings, games and sculptures spawn from her optimistic and antagonistic fieldwork in public space; meddling with the bizarre norms of capitalism and reinventing what's possible. Speaking fiction to power, Louise's work creates situations and stories which unravel reality and remix primary and secondary research; often deliberately misunderstanding or subverting cultural codes and disrupting systems in order to speculate alternative ways of seeing/being. Louise is also an AL in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London.