You and Me in Church Street
You and Me in Church Street
To the delight of my London born friends and my Mother , I opted to stay 40 minutes outside of the city that week with my Grandma in rural Kent. I'm sure this gave my mind and body a good rest each night though I had to learn to add on at least an extra hour to journey time if I was to arrive at the Showroom at a reasonable hour!
On my first day in London,Sunday 4th of July, I decided to walk from Victoria station to the Showroom Gallery off to get a bearing on the journey I would be taking for the next 5 or so days and especially today since 'crucial maintence' was being performed on the cirleline , which seemed to be a regualr occurence!
Eventually , I found myself lost.Or at least not quite at my destination as quickly as I had thought,so instead of meeting the team at the Showroom Gallery, we met at the stall that had been set up for them at the Church Street festival near by.
The Festival consisted of a sprawling ensemble of stalls ; A clown performing tricks accompanyied by Michael Jackson tracks.The scent of fried chicken.Spices.Something a bit islamic-possibly egyptian?Incense.A stage that seemed to be solely used by local kids, singing there guts out or waving pompoms in the air and all manner of other things 'Church Street' .
Eventually I found Emma a freelance project manager (currently working with the Showroom),Natasha the Gallery co-ordinator and Enrique , a voluntary assitant ,interning at the Gallery just like I did with the Collective Gallery in Edinburgh.They were loaded with banners and posters , with information on the current programme ,They also had a stack of stickers with the words 'you' and 'me' printed on them. These were for the purpose of promoting the Gallery within the local community but also to aid the participatory performance that was soon to take place in the street;
The Showroom has been playing host to a painted steel object made by the artist Ricardo Basbaum .There have been 20 of them made and each one is in circulation around the world.In this on going project the intention is to encourage innovative uses for the objects within an artistic context and ulimately to create a network and archive of work.Artists have already been asked by the Showroom to do small projects with the steel object within the Local community.In the case of the Church Street festival, a group called 'Dance Physics' performed a dance inspired by Ricardo Bausbams steel object project and also improvised dances in response to members of the public that were passing through the Church Street festival.The dancers were 'you' (wearing a sticker saying 'you') and members of the public , including myself 'me' (also made known with a sticker).
I spend most of the day handing out information at the stall , sticking 'me' stickers on passer by.I also found a stall that was set up for the purposes of showing the project 'Antamoy of the street'.This stall was dedicated to research made about the church street community in conjunction with the Festival of Architecture, celebrating the diversity of this area ( also comparing and connecting it to a similair urban environment half way across the world -the ‘high street’ from Pécs and Budapest) .They provided local aubergene based foods , based on local egyptian receipes and an audio guide ,introducing the listener to some of the people running buisnesses in the Church Street community.It was a very welcoming experience considering I was a visitor there for less than 5 hours and audibily meeting all these people in the local area.