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One Day Sculpture

Journée des barricades in New Zealand by Heather and Ivan Morison

Journée des barricades by  Heather and Ivan Morison was installed as part of the ongoing One Day Sculpture exhibition in New Zealand. The barricade, consisting of car wrecks, discarded furniture, and other urban detritus, was installed for 24 hours back in December on a central street in Wellington.

The work is part of the Morison’s ongoing investigation of future catastrophies (and their social implications).

The One Day Sculpture project looks like it’s going to be a really interesting project, featuring 20 newly commissioned projects by its close. I’m just wondering if these sculptures / performances  lasting for one day is just a function of the logistical nature of having public work in a major city centre or is an actual solid conceptual base for the entire exhibition.

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Save A City

Save A City, Text on Ice by Broken City Lab, February 3, 2009

At Windsor’s riverfront, SAVE A CITY, installed this afternoon. We opted out of using monofilament to hang the blocks of ice because there was a nice snowbank already there, and probably the last thing the Detroit River needs is more garbage in it. I’ll post some photos of the process of making these soon (definitely before the weather gets too warm).

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28 Millimetres: Women

28 Millimeters: Women by JR

This is a huge project. JR, an “undercover photographer,” recently completed this large-scale photo installation on the rooftops of Kibera, Kenya. The photos on the roofs are of Kenyan women and are printed on water-resistant materials, thereby providing the homes with some protection in the heavy rain seasons, while the hillside also features faces that are split, but completed when the train passes through Kibera twice a day.

The scale of this project is incredible, but I really like that the photos also protect the homes beneath them.

[via Wooster Collective]

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Office Hours

Broken City Lab Office Hours

It’s that time of the week, Broken City Lab office hours on Tuesday, February 3rd, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. Feel free to drop by to contribute, engage, ask questions, and fix this city. We’ll be finishing up some projects and start planning our next event.

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Linoleum Asphalt Mosaics

This project demonstrates an interesting way to use free samples of linoleum tiles for street mosaics. These tiles originated in the 70s in Philadelphia and are also called Toynbee Tiles. Construction seems fairly simple, though a bit time consuming, but could be a great addition to any sidewalk. The video is about 6 minutes and worth watching.

[via F.A.T. & Craft]

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Victory Gardens

Victory Gardens, a community art project that encourages people to grow their own food

Victory Gardens is a new project by Amy Franceschini. The project recalls the WWII victory gardens project that encouraged citizens to grow their own food as a tactic to keep them calm over the war and support their troops. Franceschini, the daughter of an organic farmer and an industrial farmer, takes the project back to where it began—in front of the city hall buidling in San Fransisco, where they planted a large garden and since introduced a pilot project to disseminate the skills and tools needed to do urban-scale gardening across 15 households throughout San Fransisco.

There’s also a write-up on the SF Victory Gardens 2007 project in the previously mentioned JoAP.

I know FedUp is working really hard in this city, and that Tom Lucier proposed planting a garden for the downtown mission, and that Scaledown once (maybe) suggested the old Greyhound station downtown is turned into some kind of market, and that there’s rumours of a symposium surrounding urban activism that may discuss some of these very things… so (since this is what BCL does) I have to suggest that we move forward with the planning for a large-scale urban/community gardening plan, something like turning 10% of the riverfront into a community garden (maybe on the slopes that lead up to University Ave). Anyone interested?

[via]

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Algorithmic Walk

Algorithmic Walk for Border Culture

Last Thursday in Lee Rodney’s Border Culture class, we went out on an algorithmic walk to explore Wyandotte from Glengarry to Gladstone. The students were given the algorithm and map I made that you see above, but with varying order, and then sent out. As the goal was to have the students become familiar with the many grocery stores, restaurants, and commercial / architectural / commercial peculiarities of the area, the algorithm was based around specific instructions to guide them to pay closer attention to details through photographing, sketching, and noting, rather than an algorithm to guide them down different streets. 

I think the walk (and algorithm) went over pretty well. We’ll be looking at all the students documentation and hearing about their adventures this week in class (some students have already started posting on the Border Culture blog), but I think something like this on a larger scale would be another great addition to the ongoing walking series that have been led or initiated by Tom Lucier over the last few months. We’ve spoken about this before, but now we just need to set a date.