Output details

Dominoes

• PaR (DVD and portfolio)

This dynamic, sculptural, public art project explores how an artwork might function to make a social intervention through the engagements of the people who build it, witness it, and take it into their own realm of personal making - both during the event and subsequently. The project sought an aesthetic object to mobilise events of not just architectural but socio-geographic scale.

300 word statement - Information about the research process and/ or content

The research inquiry of this PaR project explores how an artwork might function to make a social intervention through the engagements of the people who build it, witness it, and take it into their own realm of personal making - both during the event and subsequently. The project sought an aesthetic object to mobilise events of not just architectural but socio-geographic scale.

The outcome is a site-responsive, mobile social sculpture of concrete building blocks arranged as a line of dominoes which collapses progressively over considerable distances, linking disparate socio-geographic spaces in the process. For example, Dominoes linked the five London Olympic boroughs when first commissioned for the Games. The line of dominoes thus linked poor and rich areas in a chain of physical and symbolic cause and effect. Beyond the aesthetic experience generated, a socially-engaged process was activated by the involvement of several hundred volunteers, widely drawn socio-geographically.

Dominoes was subsequently commissioned, on parallel bases, for the opening of a number of international festivals (Dijon, Ljubljana, Helsinki, Bailleul/Poperinge, and Copenhagen between 2009 and 2013). Owing to the various contexts, the resonances were different in each environment. In Bailleul/Poperinge, Dominoes negotiated the divisions still existing in northern France and Belgium (dating to the First World War), whilst in Copenhagen it was followed live by 275,000 online viewers, including some of the 30,000 strong audience in the streets who were able to follow the whole route on their smart phones.

The findings of this PaR project have been disseminated through the live events and an online presence. At once a social installation and performative praxis, Dominoes was first activated in London in July 2009. NB the DVD recordings made in Helsinki and Copenhagen do not document the full social process, but see Portfolio for online reviews and media.