The Future is Floating 2
A conversation between Claire Doherty and Lorna Brown
Founder and Director Claire Doherty discusses the origins and the future of Situations, a commissioning and research program based at the University of West England in Bristol and their current project, Nowhereisland, a large-scale public art project conceived by artist Alex Hartley and commissioned as part of the UK Cultural Olympiad 2012. This island, originating from the Arctic, will journey around the south west region of England this summer, stopping at ports and harbours as a visiting ‘island nation’. Accompanied by its land based Embassy, its six-week journey will finish in Bristol on the 9th September 2012. The public is invited to learn more, become a citizen, and track the new nation’s progress here.
Claire Doherty is a curator and writer who investigates new and unconventional models of curatorial practice. Situations commissions artists’ projects, often outside conventional gallery or museum settings, with an emphasis on new forms of public engagement which span international boundaries. In collaboration with the Litmus Research Initiative at Massey University and a vast network of curators and institutions, Doherty co-directed One Day Sculpture with David Cross, a diverse series of twenty commissioned, 24-hour temporary public artworks across New Zealand. Doherty is a Visiting Lecturer in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art in London and Senior Research Fellow at the University of West England in Bristol, UK. Doherty lectures and publishes internationally. She is editor of Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation; (Black Dog Publishing, 2004); Documents of Contemporary Art: Situation(Whitechapel/ MIT Press, 2009), and co-editor with David Cross of One Day Sculpture (Kerber, 2009), with Paul O’Neill, Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art (Valiz, 2011) and with Gerrie van Noord, Heather and Ivan Morison: Falling into Place (Book Works, 2009).
Lorna Brown is an artist, writer, independent curator and founding member of Other Sights and participant in the Communications Office.
This conversation is the final installment of “The Situation is This: Speakers Series 2011” and a bridge to “The Future is Floating”, a series of Communication Office events that will take place in various locations around Vancouver during 2012.
We are grateful to our Speaker Series partner the Langara College Centre for Art in Public Spaces and project funders the City of Vancouver 125 and the Public Art Program.
About The Communications Office:
Late last year, Other Sights formed a Communication Office, and we have been talking and thinking about how The Future is Floating in so many ways. Whether it’s melting ice caps, waves of social unrest, listing economies or just a general sinking feeling, the future is uncertain, and fluidly so. In waving or drowning, we propose a series of events that focus our attentions, invite new ideas and put us in touch, whether face to face or ear to ear.
This podcast is launched on the anniversary of the 2010 eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, whose free-floating ash cloud covered much of Northern Europe, causing 6 days of air travel disruptions across the continent. The grounding of European flights avoided about 344×106 kg of CO2 emissions per day, while the volcano emitted about 150×106 kg of CO2 per day.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:58 — 70.0MB)