Output details

"On-Site"

The film of "On-Site" records the outcomes of a project from MAP (Music Arts Projects)/making, an initiative that brought together musicians and visual artists from the Guildhall School and the Royal College of Art. The researcher was the Director of the Barbican and Guildhall School’s jointly funded Creative Learning division, that led MAP/making. His principal role in the research was the overall curation of the project.

"On-Site’s" participants were all graduates of either the Guildhall School or the RCA. The project built on earlier MAP/making collaborations described in submissions to the previous RAE. "On-Site’s" unique features included its reach to graduates, its collaboration with the Barbican Arts Centre and its contrapuntal relationship to the Barbican’s architectural OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture)/progress show.

"On-Site’s" research goal was the examination of a physical space at a turning point in its use. How might this spark the creativity of artists? "On-Site" was therefore both site-specific and time-specific, and the artists’ creativity akin to rescue-archaeology.

The space was vast – a disused exhibition hall of the Barbican soon to become a multiplex cinema, but at the time of "On-Site", a wasteland of display racks, tortured furniture, and strange sounds in windowless halls.

The research process encouraged the artists to respond curiously and creatively to these discarded signs and to deduce meaning that could be communicated to the observers of the concluding exhibition.

And what was the result of the research; how did this apparently dead space affect the artists who excavated it? Their work, perhaps surprisingly, spoke more of excitement and wonder than decay and pessimism.

And this is "On-Site’s" research conclusion: that a space at the centre of a city can never boast anything more than a temporary function; that its purpose is always provisional; but that discarded artefacts of one age can sometimes be re-imagined as both summary and prelude.