FLOATING CITY AND LONDON’S FUTURE AT RICH MIX
Several months ago I was approached by Cristina Ramos and Elisabetta Rabajoli, two young and promising curators attending Nico de Oliveira’s CURATING THE CONTEMPORARY MA porgramme at the London Metropolitan University.
The fact that I had graduated from that same university and that Nico had been my tutor was just a pure coincidence that led to a very exciting but challenging project.
Elisabetta and Cristina’s elaborated a project where not only I had to come up with a definition for a term to describe or predict London’s future, but I also had to complement that word with an artwork of mine which had to frame the definitions of the terms written for the occasion by writers: Daniel F. Herrmann, Oliver Carruthers, Nick Haeffner, Duncan Hay, Mark Hutchinson, Nina Power and Nick Bearman. To top it all up the work had to be installed by the curators themselves.
But that’s not all. I was away from London and could only fly in on one specific day to bring the artwork in and to view the space. BUT, but, my luggage got lost and landed in Munich instead. Only after one whole and stressful week the luggage chase ended, this time at the post office: the last resort for a last attempt to try to get my work to its final destination.
Well, let me tell you, quite an Odyssey all together. Eventually everything did come together and now I am feeling overjoyed to have been able to be part of this experience.
Elisabetta who I was able to briefly meet at the Venice Biennale and Cristina who unfortunately I’ve never met, have done a great job with my bags and the show is finally opening tonight at Rich Mix in East London. I would like to thank Pauline Desouza and Hannah Garrett from Diversity Art Forum for all their amazing support in making this show happen. Also, I need to mention that this exhibition is a joint collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery which I think is doing a great job supporting young curators and the London Metropolitan University.
I am posting few pics Cristina and Elisabetta have sent me so far. For more info the link to the venue: http://www.richmix.org.uk/whats-on/event/london-future-the-floating-city/ The show runs until September 21th
By the way the titles of this work is: Beautifully Shopwrecked: A London Oxymoron
Here is also the term I came up with and its definition:
To be honest with you I had moments I wanted to swap it with the term Cloudy and with another work of mine titled: It always rains on wet! That would have been very appropriate for London and for adventure.
Beautifully shopwrecked: A London Oxymoron
DICTIONARY NEW ENTRY!
SHOPWRECK
Definition of shopwreck
noun (plural shopwrecks)
1 [mass noun] the aggregate of people whose sole economic policies are based on
consumption and whose principles of the market have become universal principles of
human sentiment and behaviour.
• the community that can only function through excess consumerism as by the
commodification of nature and therefore of the fundamental values of human beings.
• the society reduced to dependence from a rampant materialistic ideology where the
greater progressive consumption of goods is economically and socially beneficial but in fact
acts to the disadvantage towards all natural orders.
• the civilization that could only survive whilst anchored to a system of reckless
consumption and waste and whose culture is marooned in materialist values of possession.
2 the collapsing of all social and natural domains into single western market logic.
all that reckless shopping heralds shopwreck
figurative
by rejecting conscience, they have made a shopwreck of their future
verb
(be shopwrecked)
(of a person or society) suffer a shopwreck: feel shopwrecked: to shopwrecked a place:
The economy has shopwrecked that Country
He felt as he had just shopwrecked his life
(as adjective shopwrecked)
a person so desperate that seemed shopwrecked
Origin: shop + wreck
Shop:
Middle English: shortening of Old French eschoppe ‘lean-to booth’, of West Germanic
origin; related to German Schopf ‘porch’ and English dialect shippon ‘cattle shed’. The verb
is first recorded (mid 16th century) in the sense ‘imprison’ (from an obsolete slang use of
the noun for ‘prison’).
Wreck:
Middle English (as a legal term denoting wreckage washed ashore): from Anglo-Norman
French wrec, from the base of Old Norse reka ‘to drive’; related to wreak
CLAUDI PIRIPIPPI 