Deptford X 2004
Deptford X 2004 Festival
2004 Festival Archive:
Festival director:
Reuben Thurnhill
core artists:
- Pete Gomes
- Leo Fitzmaurice
- Christoph Schafer
- Neil Goodwin
- John Hodges
- Gordon Matta-Clark
- Dan Graham
- Vito Acconci
- Luis Guerreiro
Artists:
- Jonathan Callan
- Tony Broadway
- Jeremy Butler
- Jennifer Deans
- Sheena Hamson
- Warren King
- Helen Morse Palmer
- Oliver Shone
- Ben Mark Williams
- Jenny Wright
- Gordon Furn
- Jodi Amer
- Stephen Bollard
- Diane Coates
- Richard Cole
- Dee Collings
- Gemma Heald
- Karl Hobbs
- Kate Hodge
- Andrea Lacey
- Lynne Marie-Davidson
- Colin Ray
- Sofia Schizas
- Jen Wu
- Mark Pearson
- Anthony Gross
- Svetlana Mircheva
- Laurence Noga
- Simon Betts
summary:
For two weeks Deptford will again be home to exhibitions, opens studios as well as 18 sited projects in warehouses, railway arches, an old distillery, shops, markets and public squares each becoming part of the fabric of the city.
This year’s event makes connections between architecture, city spaces and the visual arts. The title Transient States refers to different strategies artists have adopted to engage in the changing structure of their localities.
The opening of Laban in 2002 and its winning of the Stirling prize in 2003 signalled the start of a new wave of architectural attention for Deptford. Currently Will Alsop’s design for Goldsmiths is on site and major plans for other developments by architects such as Richard Rodgers Partnership are in the pipeline. Development means more facilities and improvements to the urban fabric – it can also be a signal for disruption to the existing population and herald displacement and gentrification. Some artists in Deptford X this year take their immediate environment as their subject and have used art as a way to open up the dialogue about how change is decided, how communities are consulted and what form the new urban landscape takes.
A day of free talks and discussions by artists’ will focus on the ideas of utopia, city planning and artists’ actions in the city space. These discussions bring together artists and creators who reflect on the effect of the upgrading of urban districts, demolition of superfluous housing and city redevelopment. Leo Fitzmaurice from Further Up in the Air, Liverpool; Christoph Schafer, Park Fiction, Hamburg; Pete Gomes, artist and Neil Goodwin and John Hodges , Gallery 491, Leytonstone each reflect on site, history and the relationship between policies and art. Each have made interventions in proposed urban developments, monitoring, recording or changing the structure and shape of a city.
Deptford’s proposed new architectural sites are the core of Pete Gomes’ new art work. On the opening day Gomes will build up a live (architectural) plan drawing across the streets of Deptford through the layering of points and planes. This new work, SE8 Version 1.0, will place some of the proposed new architectural buildings directly within their context, Deptford.
Mobile communication systems and the Internet have also impacted on our environment and the fact that Deptford will soon be the first place in London where it will be possible to connect to the Internet for whenever and wherever you are in the locality, presents artists with new ways of engaging with the City’s structure. James Stevens’ BlinkX and ConsumeX streaming media scheduling and wireless Internet utilities are direct examples of how artists have made use of these new communication systems, however, do these forms of communication change the social make-up of cities and how people interact? Will they eventually change the structure of our urban spaces? These are questions still to be answered.
Deptford X will also host new work by young European artists from Bulgaria , Greece . Germany and Poland , who are part of a larger European network of artists. This network encourages exchange of ideas, experience and people. It allows artists to spend time in other European cities to research and develop new work that is born out of their experiences of their new urban environment.
Film screenings and documentaries accompany these activities. Works by Gordon Matta-Clark, Dan Graham and Vito Acconci engage in a discourse on the historical and social functions of contemporary cultural systems and include investigations into performance, urban environments and architecture.
These are ideas are the beginning, rather than an end of an event. Engaging with Deptford’s changing landscape presents artists with new opportunities for interactions, actions and remodelling of new sites.
