Output details

Something happening / snapshot : The project is constituted as a series of located interventions, each conceived to create a situation-specific event in public space. The work explores the ways in which direct artistic intervention can be used to generate located meetings in social space and what might be revealed within an artistic event shaped and sustained purely by the participation, or non-participation, of its audience.

Status: Performed in Spain, Italy, Wales; since September 2008. Originally developed and presented within a commission produced by MAPA (Pontós, Spain), as the culmination of an artist residency awarded for the located public development of aspects of ongoing research-led site and context-specific work. With subsequent versions, shaped for each location and context specifically, being commissioned and produced by Short3 (Rome, Italy) and AHRC Living Landscapes (Aberystwyth University, Wales). The work being realised within the context of Brookes’ ongoing artistic collaboration with Spanish artist Rosa Casado. Research questions: • In what ways can direct artistic intervention be used to generate located meetings in social space? • What might be revealed within an artistic event shaped and sustained purely by the participation, or non-participation, of its audience? • How might the act of documentation itself be folded back into the dramaturgy of an event? • If the meaning of social space is defined by use and history, how might that meaning be refreshed or renegotiated? Significant features: The project is constituted as a series of located interventions, each conceived to create a situation-specific event in public space. Focusing and sustaining the event of a public meeting, while engaging and revealing those present directly in the development of that event; through their choices, through their individual awareness of those choices, and through their attempts to generate personal traces and mementos of their own participation. Each work proposes a single direct action as the focus and impetus for a social event. Spectators are invited to complete the work by entering and being photographed within it; the work becoming manifest in the resulting series of photographs, and in the progressive and accumulative attempts to realise them. All the resulting images are printed and made freely available to anyone who appears in them.