INTERЯOGATION: WEST BROMWICH explores the impact that one artist can make in one place, in one day.

The programme aims to look at what impact an artist can make by working quickly and responsively to a specific site in just one day, and provides opportunities for artists to work together within public realm spaces.

Building on the success of last year’s Interrogation: Walsall, (www.interrogation-walsall.blogspot.com) where the emphasis was on exploring how an art gallery can connect with public realm space, the concern this year will be to investigate how artists are ‘bridging the gap’ between people and cultural activity as well as gaps in infrastructure, regeneration and consultation processes. This will be done through four interrogation days using four different methodologies:

INTERЯOGATION: ACTION RESEARCH (taking place on 08/09/2010)

INTERЯOGATION: PARTICIPATION (taking place on 15/09/2010)

INTERЯOGATION: SITE SPECIFIC (taking place on 22/09/2010)

INTERЯOGATION: INTERVENTION (taking place on 29/09/2010)

Each interrogation day will have a specialist mentor who will have expertise and knowledge in that particular day’s methodology to help guide artists through their mission.

Each ‘interrogation’ will last a full day and will see artists learning about different approaches to each of the methods and then planning their own approach, supported by the guest artist and Anna, and going in to the town centre to put theory into practice, interacting with the public of West Bromwich.

Each ‘interrogation’ will produce a set of evidence and information which will be displayed in Interrogation HQ, (otherwise known as Unit 26, Community Artspace (next to Boots, Queens Square Shopping Centre, West Bromwich), to build up a picture of West Bromwich and the role the artist can play in ‘bridging the gap’.

There will also be a conference event to disseminate the findings of the programme and to share our approach with other artists and regeneration professionals alike on Friday 1 October 2010 at the Community Artspace from 1pm. If you would like to come along email chloebrown@multistory.org.uk

For information on how are plans for Interrogation:West bromwich are progressing visit Anna’s blog.

Or to see our live blog during each of the missions go to the Longhouse blog.

With a stall in the indoor market from April to October 2010 as our research centre, we are asking such questions about regeneration in the town centre of West Bromwich.

Following a launch and seminar in 2009, a range of artists and researchers are now contributing to the investigation, amongst them Cody Lee Barbour, David Berridge, Céline Siani Djiakoua, John Dummett, Susan Fitzpatrick, Anna Francis, Neil Gray, Michelle Letowska, Leo Singer, Manu Luksch, Heather Ring, and Urban Research Collective.

Black Country creative advantage is a  partnership of the Centre for Art, Design, Research and Experimentation at the University of Wolverhampton and Multistory in West Bromwich. We are supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

For news and more detailed information see our blog: www.blackcountrycreativeadvantage.org

or join our e-group: http://groups.google.com/group/investigation_creativeadvantage

Contact: Monika Vykoukal, Curatorial Research Associate, University of Wolverhampton

Post or Visit: Stall 42, New Market Hall, Kings Square, West Bromwich B70 7NW, Monday – Friday  9am – 4pm (most weeks)

Email: M.Vykoukal [at ] wlv.ac.uk

‘Phone: 07967230880

INTERЯOGATION: WEST BROMWICH explores the impact that one artist (you) can make in one place, in one day.

The programme, organised by Longhouse and working with lead artist Anna Francis, is designed to investigate the impact of short, sharp interventions within the public realm.

The programme aims to look at what impact an artist can make by working quickly and responsively to a specific site in just one day, and provides opportunities for artists to work together within public realm spaces.

Building on the success of last year’s Interrogation: Walsall, (www.interrogation-walsall.blogspot.com) where the emphasis was on exploring how an art gallery can connect with public realm space, the concern this year will be to investigate how artists are ‘bridging the gap’ between people and cultural activity as well as gaps in infrastructure, regeneration and consultation processes.

Each interrogation day will have a specialist mentor who will have expertise and knowledge in that particular day’s methodology to help guide you through your mission.

Call to Artists:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to become a secret agent for a day in order to interrogate the public spaces of West Bromwich.

Working from a top secret base in West Bromwich you will investigate the artist’s role in the post-industrial world through one of four methods:

• INTERЯOGATION: ACTION RESEARCH (08/09/10)
• INTERЯOGATION: PARTICIPATION (15/09/10)
• INTERЯOGATION: SITE SPECIFIC (22/09/10)
• INTERЯOGATION: INTERVENTION (29/09/10)

How to Apply:

To express interest in this opportunity send:

• 300 words describing why you are right for this mission
• state your two preferred interrogation methods in order of preference e.g. choice No.1: Participation, choice No.2: Site Specific
• your C.V. and a maximum of 5 images of your current practice
• any web links

Please send your expression of interest to: chloebrown@multistory.org.uk

Deadline for Submissions:
12pm Monday 26 July 2010

(Please Note: Successful ‘agents’ will be notified on Monday 2 August 2010)

Important Information:

This is a professional development opportunity; each agent will receive a fee of £100 towards travel, time and other expenses, plus £20 on the day of the mission to cover any immediate costs incurred, such as materials for your mission

Agents must be available for the full day of the missions they select (dates are stated next to the four interrogation methods above), and for a project conference day (06/10/10), when the project findings will be disseminated.

Each mission will be documented photographically and with video and results will be displayed on the Longhouse website and on the Conference Day.

For more information go to www.longhouse.uk.com and www.interrogation-walsall.blogspot.com

Mission Control:

Longhouse is an annual programme of work carried out by community arts organisation, Multistory based in West Bromwich in the West Midlands. Longhouse is dedicated to the professional development of artists working in the public realm and provides knowledge, support and funding to artists to develop their practice.

Anna Francis is an artist whose work examines private histories, public space, and civic languages; using forms of intervention, mapping, performance, consultation, and photography to investigate the impact of art and culture on the regeneration of cities, and the artist’s role within this.

Time: 18:30

Date: Wednesday 28 July 2010

Location: ACME Project Space, 44 Bonner Road, London, E2 9JS RSVP to makingaliving@live.co.uk

Littoral (http://www.littoral.org.uk/) will be joining the event to discuss the relationships between the arts and trade unions as part of MAL’s research and campaigning on art and labour.

MAL is an independent group of arts professionals currently active across the UK who meet regularly to research and campaign on issues of art and labour.

PREVIEW : Friday 18th June 6pm/8pm

LOCATION : 3, The Strand, Longton, Stoke on Trent, ST3 2JF http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=3%2C+The+Strand%2C+Stoke-on-Trent%2C+United+Kingdom

PARKING : 3 hours FREE car park at Tesco (park at the very bottom of it and just cross the road).

End of residency opening times : Saturday 19/06, Tuesday 22/06, Thursday 24/06, Friday 25/06, 11am-2pm.

BLOG : http://longhousearcelinesianidjiakoua.blogspot.com/

“Eyes, windows to the soul”, self-initiated and self-founded one month Art residency in an empty shop in Longton, following an Action Research Bursary (Longhouse, West Bromwich). Works poetically drawing metaphors between a shop and an eye and exploring some mechanisms of vision .

“There is a human body when, between the seeing and the seen, between touching and the touched, one eye and the other, between hand and hand, a blending of some sort takes place – when the spark is lit between sensing and sensible (…)”

MERLEAU-PONTY Maurice, “Eye and Mind” in The Primary of Perception, Northwestern University Press, 1964

“One common fallacy is to assume there is an image inside your eyeball, the optical image, exciting photoreceptors on your retina and then that image is transmitted faithfully along a cable called the optic nerve and displayed on a screen called the visual cortex. Now this is obviously a logical fallacy because if you have a screen and an image displayed on a screen in the brain, then you need another little chap in there watching that image, and there is no little chap in your head. And if you think about it, that wouldn’t solve the problem either because then you’d need another little guy in his head looking at the image in his brain and so on and so forth, and you get an endless regress of eyes and images and little people without really solving the problem of perception. So the first thing you have to do to understand perception is to get rid of the idea of images in the brain and think instead of transforms or symbolic representations of objects and events in the external world.”

Synapses and the Self – Lecture by V.S. Ramachandran – BBC 4 – 2003

9-piece puzzle explores the complexities that surround developing work for the public realm. It aims to become a useful resource for artists and a space for conversations to take place.

There are several ways for people to engage with the project, for example;

• An artist toolkit
• Reviews of events, exhibitions, public art projects etc
• A ‘comment’ section for taking a more in depth look at certain public realm issues and debates
• A ‘no comment’ section for pictures rather than words
• ‘Blue Sky Proposals’ – a competition inviting artists to send in hypothetical proposals for interventions into public spaces

CONTENTS:

• Comment: Landmarks
• No Comment
• Review: The Mac’s Back
• Blue Sky Proposals
• Review: This is a Stick Up
  

• How does this process work?
• What is the process/ method of communication?
• What are the benefits of working collaboratively?
• How does the collaboration benefit your individual practice?
• How do you reach a consensus?
• How is the relationship equal?
• Why did you choose to collaborate?
• What do you want to achieve through the collaboration?
• What are the issues/problems of collaboration?

Documenting this information will provide a useful and interesting case study into collaboration and cross-cultural practice. How do two artists with very different practices and ways of working collaborate effectively together?

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Autopoesis by Sue Challis and Shaheen Ahmed

We first worked together on ‘Impact Plus Art’, a year-long ACWM-funded project Sue coordinated working with women from South Asian and Black Country backgrounds towards a Wolverhampton exhibition. We realised we wanted to work with each other again, overcame our mutual fears of rejection, and looked for suitable community arts projects. We talked about what ‘collaborative art work’ is: is it separate pieces with a joint theme, pieces we have physically made together, individual pieces which come from joint ideas? Eventually, it seemed that, if we wanted to collaborate we’d have to make it happen – we’d have to make collaboration itself our next project. Since, Sue was also finishing a part time MA in Fine Art at BIAD (August 2009), we could collaborate on work towards that show. Over six months we filmed ourselves in conversation – in Shaheens’ dining room, Sue’s studio/shed, a cafe in Bishops Castle, with and without children around. We became very frank and probably a little intense, about art and politics, gender and religion. Shaheen is a devout Muslim and Sue a devout atheist. Sue is an irredeemable southerner and Shaheen an unrepentant northerner. Shaheen is primarily a graphic artist, basing her work on non-representational pattern, and Sue mainly makes videos which show people. Sue is ambivalently single with a grown-up son and Shaheen is happily married with school-aged children. Our differences seem in some ways to strengthen our relationship; we decided our starting point was not to try to change one another, take our friendship for what it is, and see if such different people could make a working collaborative partnership.

The biggest barrier to making work seems to be the usual one of lack of time – and lack of money to free up time. This is partly to do with women’s lives and careers, partly to do with being self employed, ill-health, and partly to do perhaps with self denial about something which seems like indulgence. Why try to collaborate, when it is sometimes harder ? We both work separately as well & with other people. But we both think that it is important to get to know each other across apparent cultural divides – divides often exaggerated by politicians and racists.

We became interested in the idea of autopoesis, overlaps, interdependence which might change but not compromise identity – and looked for things we had in common. For the MA show 2009 we developed a theme around cultural phenomena which link and loop together, which exist alongside each other, which interact, and help form each other whilst preserving their identities. An Arabic text became an English folksong which became a painting based on Arabic text … The work was only partially successful: it still felt like ‘work in progress’ and a record of a process. Yet one of the films – Ahmed’s Bricks – worked as a finished piece; that is, a work produced by Sue but in response to our joint discussions.Currently, we are posting a shared sketchbook between us two and a third artist in Ireland, Mandy Mullowney. Often the work in that little book clearly is in response to each other’s entries – we have to work on not feeling exposed, but it’s always fab getting it in the post! Now we are planning a 3-D work (using paper sculpture) which will have been physically worked on by both of us – it’s also outside both our usual skill areas but part of our discussions about ideas, morality & religion.

In collaborative community arts work – eg planning and running joint workshops or public arts events, we believe that feelings around the differential value placed on different skills (eg ’leading’/managing vs creative or technical skills) are often unacknowledged; partnerships can sometimes be skewed by undiscussed lack of confidence or exaggerated respect. We have talked to women artists who have felt put down by male collaborators, especially around technical competence, and where essential social skills are undervalued.

If this writing seems to blur ideas around making art and doing community projects, that’s because, like many people, we’re trying to do both in order to make a living. The vast majority of human activities require collaboration, and where roles are clearly or traditionally defined this seems to be a smooth process. But our experience of making art is that it feels like a new process every time, so you have to keep working out new ways of relating to each other. And while we keep on muddling along, we’d like to hear anyone else’s ideas on this.

Shaheen & Sue

Working Parts, the Black Country Arts and Disability Network, is hosting a two-hour event to encourage a discussion about the arts and disabled people. The event is free and refreshments will be available.

Working Parts steering group members from Black Country Touring, Walsall Council Creative Development Team, The Arena Theatre Wolverhampton and Multistory in Sandwell will facilitate an informal discussion about how Black Country artists are creatively thinking about disability; look at potential training needs and offer artists the chance to sign up to the Working Parts arts and disability ‘hub’, all of which aim to increase potential work opportunities.

To find out more information and book a place please email Alan McLean alan@bctouring.co.uk by Friday, April 30 or call 0121 552 0014. Feel free to pass this invitation to other local artists.

Check out current Working Parts activity at www.workingparts.co.uk