Construction Gallery – 18 – 29 Jan 2012

Keeping the Park: Archive is a sound installation based on a re-working of Keeping the Park, an audio guide originally made for Wandle Park, Colliers Wood in 2010. Amidst a wild track of birdsong and traffic, you hear the voices of the local residents of the area. An ‘instructional voice’, which playfully guides users around the park in the original version, has been extracted, leaving space between the moments of anecdote, conversation and thought.

The original audio guide explores how different park users relate to, care for and think about the park. Bending and borrowing the conventional form of a tourist’s audio guide, Present Attempt created this bespoke experience in collaboration with local residents and park users, through conversation, walking and workshops.

The project was originally commissioned for Away Day, a festival organised by POST, which took place in the borough of Merton in May 2010. The original twenty minute audio guide is available to borrow from Donald Hope Library or available to download from Merton Council’s website.

Construction Gallery and Cafe
74 – 80 Upper Tooting Road
London SW17 7PB

Image Credit: Tracing Mobility

We are very pleased to be presenting a talk about our project Walking Smiles as part of the Tracing Mobility Open Platform on Saturday 26th November at the HAUS DER KULTUREN DER WELT in Berlin.

Tracing Mobility: Cartography and Migration in Networked Space, is the final event that completes the Tracing Mobility project; a project which spanned two years and four European countries. The overall project included residencies, workshops, exhibitions, symposiums, and other satellite events that took place along the Croatian coast (north of Split); in Nottingham, UK; Warsaw, Poland; and Berlin, Germany. More information at www.tracingmobility.org

The Open Platform events is intended to break down the limits and barriers caused by conventional exhibition formats, and challenge the discursive spaces used for art. Tracing Mobility want to open up the HKW, an established international arts venue, to the fringes of production, exploring movement, communication and aesthetics in culture, becoming that space that Boris Groys claims to be the distinct space of contemporary art, “in which multitudes can view themselves” and which “assists [us] in reflecting upon [our] own condition”. More info on the Open Platform here.

We are presenting some new work called MOUSE at Being Seen, Being Heard: A One-Day Symposium which is part of the SACRED season of performance at the Chelsea Theatre, London on Sunday, 27 November 2011 from 10.30-18.00.

The event takes as its staring point the quote from Jacques Rancière that, ‘Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak.’

This one-day symposium brings together artists, scholars, and curators to explore the ways in which all three are active in shaping the contexts in which artistic work is produced and experienced: that is, how it is seen and how it is heard.  We will consider artistic events as only one manifestation of ongoing processes by which groups and individuals attempt to intervene within the politics of visibility itself.  How do we decide who gets a voice?  How can we influence what is perceived as political?  How do new networks and communities take a form, and how might artistic processes suggest radical ways in which these forms might be conceived?

Featuring keynote addresses from:

• John McGrath, artistic director of National Theatre Wales and author of Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy, and Surveillance Space
• Lena Simic of The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home (http://www.twoaddthree.org)
• Lorena Rivera de Beer, The Committee for The Free University of Liverpool (http://thefreeuniversityofliverpool.wordpress.com)

Also featuring lecture-performances from Alison Grace, The Everyday Cosmonaut (Johanna Linsley and Sophie Robison), and Present Attempt, as well as scholarly papers and sharings of practice from Charlotte Bell, Simon Bowes, Lee Campbell, Nicola Conibere, Ella Finer, Lynne McCarthy, Tom Richards, Roberto Sanchez-Camus, and Conohar Scott.   We are also very happy to be joined by Brazilian artists Thelma Bonavita, creator of the Tropicalia-inspired I am a Gogoia Fruit (free for all symposium delegates), and Gustavo Ciriaco, creator of Aqui enquanto caminhamos (Here whilst we walk, 2006) and artistic director of Teatro Cacilda Becker (Rio de Janeiro).

More info at: www.chelseatheatre.org.uk

21/22 October at Riverside Studios

SHOW TiME returns to Riverside Studios to present a line up of extraordinary artists making contemporary performance work. Opening a new space in London for artists and audiences to come together to experiment, we have combined works in development and completed performances to give you two diverse days of theatrical experiments. We hope you can join us on the river and support the event and all the artists involved.

More info here: www.show-time.org.uk

Hymn for Hope Square was created as part of  SLICE, an international project that presents twenty new artworks created following a dialogue between UK and Pakistani artists. It is a response to Hope Square near Liverpool Street Station in London.

SLICE maps an imaginary line that cuts through buildings and across streets from Lahore to London, establishing a new dialogue with the social and physical fabric of two iconic, complex and historically linked cities. Focusing on the first mile at each end of the line, which runs from Lahore Central Station to Liverpool Street Station in London, a group of Lahore and London based artists were invited to make a work each, inspired by a location on the slice.

Hymn for Hope Square was created through a series of chance encounters. Over a number of months we visited and used the square. We stood, we sat and we waited – sometimes impatiently, sometimes fascinated, other times frustrated. We noticed a gap between the name of the square and the atmosphere of it. And we found ourselves writing a hymn in praise of Hope Square, in an attempt to redress this imbalance through words and song.

SLICE was a project produced by Other Asias and Scale. It was funded by Arts Council England, Apples and Snakes and the VASL Artists Collective. 

This is an ‘incomplete textual sample’ made in collaboration with Rachel Lois Clapham, that comes out of Walking (S)miles by Present Attempt. Rachel was commissioned by Hazard Festival and Critical Writing Collective to respond to some of the work in Hazard 2010 (Manchester’s micro-festival of incidental intervention and sited performance). The text emerged from transcripts of audio recordings that Rachel made as she wandered through Manchester on Saturday afternoon and too part in Walking Smiles – an event that builds a unique ‘map’ of a city as people wander through it, collecting smiles from passers by. Below is the text.

Optional Instructions for Self-Assembly

1. Print the document

2. Cut each of the pages down the centre with the exception of the last page

3. Affix the cut pages to the last page

4. (W)read the document

Present Attempt are making a piece of work as part of SLICE,  an international project commissioning twenty new artworks created in collaboration with UK and Pakistani artists. SLICE maps an imaginary line that cuts through buildings and across streets from Lahore to London. Focusing on the first mile at each end of the line, which runs from Lahore Central Station to Liverpool Street Station in London, Lahore and London based artists have been invited to make a work that responds to a location on the slice.

Back in May all the artists in London walked the section of the Slice which started in Hope Square just outside Liverpool Street Station and ended beyond the Brady Centre in the East End. Early on from a suggestion James made, we decided to response to Hope Square. Initially what struck James was the contrast between the busy place of passage and the immobility and stillness of the bronze statue of  the Kinder transport found in the square, a memorial to Jewish refugees of the second world war. Since the walk we have found that the site resonates with the context of the project in multiple ways. It made us think about to the state of emergency of contemporary cities, travels between London and Lahore, perception of everyday places or spaces and the possibility of looking at a place anew, with a naïve eye, as if you were seeing it for the first time.

We have now spent a couple of days working in Hope Square. After repeated visits we can ironically say that it is hopeless and a terrible place! There is something definitely tragic about the square. 6 giant ugly white pillars dominate it, with a McDonalds covering one of it’s facades and franchises setting up their pop up stalls and marquis to sell commercial products of various kinds right in the middle. The square, more a place of passage for commuters than a place where people hang out is littered with fast food waste. And then the statue of the Kindertransport in the middle of all this, erected in memory of the refugee children who came to Britain in search of a safe haven. The whole thing is rather paradoxical. This paradox, the gap between the name ‘Hope Square’ and the actual place which is devoid of anything really positive is guiding our thinking.

Yesterday we went back to Hope Square to further our investigations through in situ writing and filming. We have come back to our earlier intuition about building a picture of ‘Hope Square’, settling on writing to reveal and approach the paradox of Hope Square. A textual depiction of Hope Square is what has emerged out of the work yesterday, it remains to be seen how this text will manifest in its final visual form. Looking forward to sharing the final piece which will form part of an exhibition in Ideas Store Whitechapel, Rich Mix in Bethnal Green and the National College of Arts in Lahore. To be continued…

SHOW TiME presents an extra-ordinary line up of artists from the UK making contemporary performance work. Opening a new space in London for artists and audiences to come together and take risks, in each session hosts Present Attempt combine works in development and completed performances to give you two diverse days of theatrical experiments.

Keeping the Park is an audio tour for Wandle Park which explores how different individuals relate to, care for and think about the park. Bending and borrowing the conventional form of the tourist’s audio tour, Present Attempt created a bespoke experience in collaboration with local residents and park users. Following support from a Merton Arts Development Grant the tour is now available permanently in the Donald Hope Library and on Merton Council’s website as a download.

The project was originally commissioned for Away Day, a site specific art festival that took place in the borough of Merton in May 2010. Four months earlier on a frozen February morning, Present Attempt took their first steps around Wandle Park. After that initial encounter with the park we spent time walking in and around the green spaces of Colliers Wood, performing repeated visits to the park, whilst meeting with people living in the local area. All the way along these walks and talks we recorded conversations, stories, impressions and specific memories vested in these common grounds. With the resulting material we made this audio tour for Wandle Park – a unique snapshot of the park and its users in 2010.

The people who originally guided us around the parks and green spaces of Colliers Wood, during winter and spring 2010 are the voices you will hear on the audio tour. We would like to thank all the people who generously gave their time to take part in the creation of this piece. We would also like to thank POST Artists and the team at Merton Council for commissioning the project for Away Day, and the installation of the audio guide at Donald Hope Library.

Alex Eisenberg and John Pinder are collaborating with Kings of England to make “In Eldersfield Chapter One: Elegy for Paul Dirac” which will be in shown in The Pit, The Barbican as part of SPILL Festival 22/23rd April 2011. The show is on as a double bill with I Guess if the Stage Exploded… by Sylvia Rimat.To find out more and book tickets go here.

In Eldersfield is a ten-chapter cycle of works for the twentieth century, to which we are no longer beholden but will always belong. Against a culture of lessening means and receding hopes, we raise the toast (again): to Dead Dogs, Dead Children, Dead Lovers, Dead Heroes, and how good it is to be alive. Broadening our concern for lost histories and unsayable things, we present an historical epic of open questions and long silences, in a quiet refusal to mean.

“In Eldersfield” is an ambitious work that seeks to develop a model of long-term commitment to social and cultural memory as a field of aesthetic, philosophical and political action, examining how pasts and futures are remembered and imagined in the event of live performance.

The First Chapter:

In ‘Chapter 1: Elegy for Paul Dirac’ we stage a few scenes from the life of Paul Dirac, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, aesthetician and redeemer. Dirac inherited a field of enquiry from Einstein and others and revolutionised our understanding of the material world and its mechanics, although he is barely known outside of his field.

This first Chapter invites audiences into a dialogue on hope and expectation, in a play of languages, translations, speech and silence. In order to reconsider live performance and the critical discourse it could inspire (now and in the future) “Elegy…”  explores the constancies of loyalty, responsibility and redemption, examining some lessons from a life lived in a time radically different from our own, opening up a field of unknown, unseen, unheard-of histories.

The Cast:

Rhinannon Armstong is to play Albert Einstein

Simon Bowes is to play Felix Dirac

Max Burger is to play Peter Kapitza

Alex Eisenberg is to play Werner Heisenberg

Bryony Kimmings is to play The Parrot That Thinks

AND:

John Pinder is to play Paul Dirac.