City Beautiful: Understanding Art, Understanding Singapore

One of my young Singaporean friends declared the other day that she finally understood what art is for.  After 20 years of thinking it was merely a way of beautifying our surroundings she realized that it can actually be used to make a statement about something which we may not be able to say with words.  Of course this led to a much longer conservation about how art can be used to communicate simple ideas with graphic design, communicate how to use something through industrial or product design, or it can simply exist to convey more complex, controversial, and even perhaps politically charged ideas.

With her revelation in mind I wanted to share two recent works of art by young Singaporeans which I thought communicate some uniquely Singaporean urban phenomena.  The first work deals with the Singapore’s limited land area as an island, and thus limited space for landfills, through a study of trash.  The second piece draws attention to how Singapore’s “multi-ethnic, multi-religious” population often lives in very dense highrises without actually knowing each other at all.

Republic of Pulau Semakau

Zinkie Aw’s “Republic of Pulau Semakau” highlights one of Singapore’s pressing environmental problems — limited landfill space.  She uses a series of portraits with filled trash cans in place of individual faces to present “things owned and disowned by people.”  She describes her work:

Pieced together, this body of work anchors to issues of waste management in Singapore — to realise things that we as individuals discard, will collectively contribute to Singapore’s only landfill on the offshore island of Pulau Semakau. In 1999, after having exhausted the landfills on mainland Singapore, Singapore then created a Semakau landfill by enclosing Pulau Semakau and a small adjacent island with a rock bund. In this light, we, could all be considered ‘Founders’ of this reclaimed portion of the island. It has never occurred to us where all these rubbish end up in land-scarce and over-populated Singapore. Hopefully these dustbins will form a reality check for all of us.

My favorite portrait in her series is “Ms Mamashop,” named after the neighborhood convenient stores, mamashops.  The trash in this image is mostly packaging, but by being set in a shop this piece highlights how the waste problem is not just about the items that we own and then choose to disown.  Instead it reflects how our each day consumption of  conveniences items contributes greatly to our ecological footprint.

At Our Doorsteps

Although photographer Sam Kang Li lives in a high-rise tower block with 44 other families he admits that after living there 17 years he “could barely count on one hand the number of residents [he] could readily recognize.”  In his photography project, “At Our Door Steps” he seeks to meet all of his neighbors and to take a family portrait for each of them.  Through this project he mentions not only meeting neighbors for the first time but also discovering old family friends that had been living in his block all along.  He describes his work:

…this is never a project about me, nor is it a self-expression piece. This is a project that aims to bring out the best sides of the residents of my block. So it is really satisfying for me to see people actually inviting themselves into the pictures and inviting themselves into the conversations.

Although Kang Li doesn’t directly mention this in his documentary or its description, but his work indirectly reflects the outcomes of Singapore’s efforts to create a “harmonious” society where people from multiple ethnic groups and religions live together in HDB tower blocks because of a quota system.  In an effort to prevent marginalizing minority groups Singapore implemented quota policies long ago to help promote a more integrated society. However as Kang Li’s documentary shows these policies have not led to as much integration as one would hope. However I was very excited to see that Kang Li was able to get all of his neighbors to participate in the project because they wanted to know their neighbors better.

Even though art such as these projects is considered beautiful, I hope that its story does not stop with aesthetics qualities.  I hope these projects inspire more us to invest in our city, be it through environmental improvements or by simply getting to know our neighbors.

- Melissa

All photos are from the photographers Zinkie Aw and Sam Kang Li

Urbanization Notes #4

• A Bird’s Eye View of China’s Rapid Urbanization from polis
• Miami City of Art
• Manuel Castells at Occupy London
• Street Films: documenting liveable streets worldwide
• The City Solution: Why cities are the best cure for our planet’s growing pains in National Geographic

City Beautiful: Pop-Up Cities

This week’s City Beautiful starts from a post on BLDG Blog about a forthcoming book,  Short Stories: London in Two-and-a-Half Dimensions. Authors CJ Lim and Ed Liu create a new genre of “architectural fiction” where fantastical  environments built in paper are inspired by actual sites in London meshed with stories ranging from the Three Little Pigs to Alice in Wonderland.

This and the other works below tell stories of what is most durable – our built environment – using fragile, ephemeral paper.  As a medium, 3D paper collage lends itself nicely not just to telling kid’s stories of the pop-up book variety, but the intricacies of cities, tales of how they change over time and even what they could be with a little imagination.

Hong Kong

Kit Lau, an animator by trade and dubbed Hong Kong’s “first pop-up book artist“, combines personal narrative, architectural history, and rapid urban growth in his 2009 book Hong Kong Pop Up.  Says Lau on the book’s website:

From the 30s Cantonese tenements, the squatters common in the 50s, the Kowloon Walled City, to the resettlement estates of the 60s as well as the public housing of the 70s, these homes of the many Hong Kong people witnessed how my grandparents struggled through to improve the living standard of the family.

We tend to meet the destruction and construction of cities with kneejerk nostalgia – Lau does document what was, and the stark contrast with current housing trends, in very personal terms. But rather than lament an idealized past it’s more a story of improving the standard of living, and how the built form has changed to accommodate not just a rapidly expanding population but also dreams of a better life (even if that fan of towers looks a little more ominous than the more human-scale low-rise tenements).

A few pages from Hong Kong Pop Up:

The old | Photo credit: Hong Kong Pop Up

The new | Photo credit: Hong Kong Pop Up

Charlotte

Charlotte, North Carolina probably doesn’t come to mind as a booming metropolis, yet it’s one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S. that has exploded with people and skyscrapers as banking and other corporate headquarters have set up shop. This rapid growth is the subject of a stop-motion animation film by Brooklyn artist Rob Carter. I had seen one of Carter’s films last year at a papercraft exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design in New York and was happy to stumble upon Metropolis, which documents Charlotte’s development from its first house in 1775 to the current urban skyline.

Carter’s animations using paper cut-outs are humorous in a way that’s vaguely reminiscent of Terry Gilliam‘s funky collages between skits on Monty Python’s Flying Circus: skyscrapers sprout out of nowhere, a basketball arena sails in and plops down like an uninvited flying saucer, a crinkled wad unfolds itself into highway tendrils that ring the city. As Carter describes it:

The animation literally represents this sped up urban planner’s dream, but suggests the frailty of that dream, however concrete it may feel on the ground today.

I have to disagree with him here – as an urban planner, I watch the film and think that this type of development happens more as a result of a lack of planning, a lot-by-lot real estate boom driven by speculation. The last three minutes of the nine-minute video is shown below, but you can see the whole thing  here:

London

Lim and Liu’s Short Stories mentioned above takes ten actual sites in London and tells their fictional stories primarily with visuals. From the book introduction:

The short stories of this book’s title are set in different time periods of London, intentionally locating themselves in the liminal territory between fiction and architecture … The stories are neither illustrated texts nor captioned images; the collages represent a network of spatial relationships, and the text, which splices genre such as science fiction, magical realism and the fairy tale, a thread that links some of the nodes of that network together.

The work is about London’s past – its tradition of storytelling, its mythic places and traditions informed by its architecture – but gives the author/architect free reign to re-imagine those places.  Just as we interact with the built environment on a daily basis and it infuses our experience of the city, Lim and Liu’s paper sculptures and  are the setting, a character, and even a narrator of the story.

From the story "Dream Isle" | Photo courtesy of BLDG Blog

From the story "Carousel" | Photo courtesy of BLDG Blog

~Amy

Cape Town: (Proposed) World Design Capital 2014

One of my favorite cities is Cape Town, South Africa. Tucked between the mountains and the sea, Cape Town sits at the southern tip of Africa and is a profound testament to the many cultures and peoples that have come upon the shores of that continent. The city has an active history of social change movements, dating back to the struggle against apartheid. In the years since the end of apartheid, Cape Town has grown increasingly rich with local design talent, bringing together the dynamism of the city itself with the artistry of this new talent. Increasingly, the city has become a backdrop for the art produced by its inhabitants. And that art continues to speak to the mix of peoples and cultures (black, white, Afrikaans, English, Indian, Cape Malay, and more!).

This year Cape Town was nominated for 2014 World Design Capital, a designation given to “cities that are dedicated to using design for social, cultural and economic development,” and I will be first to say that I am rooting for them! A powerful testament to the importance of design to urban spaces, the “WDC is more than just a project or a programme – it’s a global movement towards an understanding that design does impact and affect quality of human life.”

An article in the Cape Argus (5 April 2011) gave a beautiful description of Cape Town’s recently-submitted proposal:

“The 465-page bid book, which has been sent to the International Council for Societies of Industrial Design (Icsid) in Canada, has as its theme, “Live design. Transform Life”. The year 2014 marks 20 years of democracy in South Africa and is a significant moment for people to embrace such a theme.

The bi-annual WDC award is bestowed by Icsid on cities that use design for their social, economic and cultural development. The story at the heart of Cape Town’s bid theme is about the City’s use of design to overturn the negative legacies of its colonial and apartheid past that saw design dividing people, disconnecting the city, and relegating both people of colour and the urban poor to its fringes. This both denied these people equitable access to resources and opportunities, not least the opportunity of making their own contributions to a better city. It also made the country a pariah in the eyes of the world, and excluded it from many opportunities to engage in the globalizing economy.”

The designation would bring a year-long program of design-related events to Cape Town and bring even attention from the international design community. Although the city’s design community has flourished in the last 15 years, there has been no collective vision. Dr Mugendi M’Rithaa, a senior lecturer at the Department of Industrial Design at the Cape Peninsular University of Technology (CPUT), states of the WDC bidding process alone that it “gives us a common platform for acknowledging design as an asset and is a massive catalyst to align creative narratives. Cape Town’s bid is not about claiming that we are already an established ‘design capital brand’, but instead we are bidding to acknowledge that we are using design thinking as a tool for transformation. We want to show what design can do for us and that investment in design is an investment in our future.”

Design has already been a catalyst of change in Cape Town, allowing Capetonians to reposition and redefine their place in Africa and the world more every year. Let’s see what Icsid decides about, and hope that no matter what the outcome this bidding will do even more for the future of urban design on the African continent!

- Ariana K. MacPherson

City Beautiful: Slum Aesthetics (Part 1)

This is the first of two posts on outsiders and art in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum.

I recently checked out a screening of Dharavi: Slum for Sale, where director Lutz Konermann was on hand afterward to discuss his film documenting the story of how powerful real estate interests are eager to develop Mumbai’s massive Dharavi slum. The Q&A quickly devolved into a “who has the most slum street cred” smugfest, from which I quietly excused myself after the second “Well when I was in Dharavi…”.

So I was happy to read Smita Mitra’s article The Slum of All Parts in Outlook India, which chronicles how one of biggest slums in the world has become an unlikely artist’s playground and tourist attraction – and what people that actually live there think of this trend. Mitra was particularly critical of Artefacting Mumbai, a project by  artist/urbanist Alex White Mazzarella and Portland-based urban planner/filmmaker Casey Nolan. In their words, “We immerse ourselves in extremity to experience and excavate from a bee hive of humanity.”  So this is the artist as poverty archaeologist and anthropologist, sifting through the slum with his bare hands, unearthing forgotten but culturally significant relics and bringing them back to share with the civilized world. Interesting.

The community helps a neighbor's injured goat - this boy holds a vial of medicine | Photo: Artefacting Mumbai

Apparently a properly extreme immersion takes about three months, which is how long  Mazzarella and Nolan worked in Dharavi this past winter. They took photographs, blogged, painted murals on corrugated zinc walls, and invited the community to participate in art projects. According to Mitra, though, many locals whose humanness we are supposed to embrace through these acts of expression didn’t really get what these artist/planners were doing, nor did they particularly want to. I’m joining them.

Photo: Artefacting Mumbai

For a project intended to tell the story of a place, I found the authenticity Mazzarella and Nolan were trying so hard to achieve to be lost in their own story (see above image). Artefacting attempts dialogue partly through a provocative action – appropriating space in a community that is not their own to create and exhibit art to people that haven’t experienced anything quite like it.

The team paints a "Welcome Mural" at an entry point to Dharavi | Photo: Artefacting Mumbai

But the whole thing comes off as incredibly (if unintentionally) self-centered, feeling more like a documentary of the intrepid artist/planner’s “extreme immersion” than communicating much in the way of a genuine connection with the community. After all, anthropologists take years to connect with unfamiliar cultures – should we expect a few months of fieldwork to produce much more?

Check out more photos here, and watch the video below for a fascinating story of the  mural painting project. Decide for yourself – an important cultural exchange through the arts, or file under misguided poverty porn?

Stay tuned tomorrow for Part 2 of Slum Street Cred (which is far less cranky).

~Amy

Artocracy in Tunisia

the new Inside Out project by JR

A few weeks ago Amy posted a piece in the City Beautiful series about Inside Out, the Parisian  artist/photographer JR’s “one wish to change the world” with the help of a $100,000 TED Prize. As a follow up to that piece, I thought I’d share some photos from a recent Inside Out street exhibition in Tunisia where “six Tunisian photographers travelled the country to take pictures of 100 « normal » Tunisians representing the Tunisian diversity: men and women, young and old, from North, South East and West, rich or poor, civil servants, business people, workers, farmers, unemployed, and much more…”

In an email about the project, JR talks a little bit about the importance of this exhibition:

“For the first large street exhibition in a nascent Arab democracy, the posting promised to be surprising and the confrontation with art not always simple. Our first two days were quite hot (insulted in La Goulette the first day, posters taken down in Tunis the second day). So we decided to go to Sidi Bouzid (where it all started), an isolated region, to work with those who did the revolution before coming back to the popular districts of the capital.

“There is nothing better to understand the weight of traditions and the willingness to change than to post big portraits in the symbolic places of the popular districts and try to explain the concept to people nearby…

“And then, we received a warm welcome in Sfax, Sidi Bouzid, Le Kram where men and women (OK, mostly men) have asked questions, challenged the project, raised objections, posted with us, explained the project to their neighbors…

“We come back with hope that Tunisia will become a country open to art as Spain after Franco or Berlin after the wall was taken down.

“Artocracy in Tunisia, an project initiated by Slim Zeghal and Marco Berrebi and created with the group of Tunisia photographers including Sophia Baraket, Rania Dourai, Wissal Dargueche, Aziz Tnani, Hichem Driss and Héla Ammar.”

~ Ariana K. MacPherson

Public Service Murals in China’s Cities

Public service messages are not always thought of as art.  However, Urban Photo has found some beautiful mural and mosaic PSA’s in the back allies of a Shanghai and Suzhou.  The messages that accompany these colorful displays generally provide “Party-like slogans” that,

…reminded the lane’s former residents of behaviors that went along with a civilized society: protecting the environment (绿化美化，保护环境), maintaining neighborly and familial harmony (邻里团结，家庭和睦) (with the classic two grandparents-two parents-one child family structure), keeping law and order (遵纪守法，遵纪秩序), helping others (in the footsteps of the exemplary revolutionary hero Lei Feng, 学习雷锋，助人为乐)  and promoting the belief in science to combat superstitions (普及科学破除迷).

Murals in Shanghai’s back allies from Urban Photo

Urban Photo’s stories reminded me of a few posters I noticed this summer in a traditional neighborhood in Shanghai.  These posters used cartoons to inform residents of “proper behavior” while foreigners were in Shanghai for the Expo. They were part of a larger campaign that urged Shanghai’s residents not to spit, wear pajamas in public and to generally avoid being rude to tourist.

Sadly though these lanes of traditional low density housing, where such public service art is displayed, are quickly disappearing.  As Urban Photo pointed out Ruihua Lane in Shanghai is scheduled to be demolished in the near future. This leads me to wonder how many other Chinese cities have hidden public service art in their historic allies?

- Melissa

City Beautiful: Subway (sound)Tracks

When taking public transit most of us prefer  to block out the squeaks and dings, the gum smacker in the next seat, and the screeeeeches of tracks, tourists and babies – we tend to pipe our own soundtracks directly into our ear canal and watch the city go by in peace. But maybe we’re missing out on something, the little rhythms produced by hulking trains moving people around, the soundtrack created unintentionally by transit infrastructure itself?

New York Public Radio’s Remix the Rails contest chose a winner last Friday – they invited musicians to “transform ordinary subway sounds from the New York City subway into extraordinary music.” Below you can take a listen to the winning entry from Lucas Carpenter, called “This is the Train” (impressive if you can listen without a side-to-side head bob):

In a more conceptual project combining transit data and sound, Google designer Alexander Chen’s Conductor project took New York subway lines, animated them, and turned the moving “trains” into a pluckable  instrument:

Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop.

See it in action here (give it a minute to get going):

The design is based on Massimo Vignelli’s elegantly abstract 1972 subway map, which some loved, some hated, but most agree that regardless of its utility for not getting lost it does look pretty cool.

Massimo Vignelli's 1972 Subway Map | Courtesy of Visual Complexity

Granted, New Yorkers spend a lot of time on the subway and it’s quite loud underground, but have musicians and designers in other big cities turned noise into anything ipod-worthy?

~Amy

 

City Beautiful: Inside Out

Cities don’t generally hide confrontation. The friction from millions of bodies, minds, and diverse beliefs in close quarters creates the energy for both innovation and conflict. While the city wears much on its sleeve,  so many stories remain untold. But a new art project promises to expose some of them – the city is a confrontational canvas exhibiting faces that might be overlooked much of the time, but have exceptional things to tell us.

Security fence between Israel and Palestine (Israeli side), "Face2Face" project | Photo: BasilicStudio // aKkY

That’s the essence of Inside Out – it’s the Parisian  artist/photographer JR’s “one wish to change the world” with the help of a $100,000 TED Prize.  His work takes huge black-and-white photos of faces, or fragments of faces, and adheres them to walls, trains, rooftops, stairwells – anyone can be a model, anywhere – from favelas in Rio to walls in Los Angeles. Now the world is invited to join in the process. The artist explains in this recent TED talk:

His past projects have explored social questions such as why Israelis and Palestinians can’t get along to showcasing courageous women from around the globe. Generally there’s some element of creating a conversation around a conflict big or small through pasting these uninvited guests in unexpected places where we can’t help but engage with them and anyone else who happens to be around.

Inside Out takes that idea and opens it up to everyone’s participation. The project is about “standing up for what you care about” – a compelling story that needs to be told, photographing who you see to be the face of it, and then pasting it on a city surface. Anyone can submit an idea and upload a portrait to the website. JR’s crew will print it on a poster and mail it back for you to wallpaper a conversation piece on your own city.

Below are some photos of JR’s previous work – looking forward to seeing the world’s cities blanketed with more.

~Amy

Image from Favela Morro da Providencia in Rio, part of the "Women are Heroes" project | Photo: BasilicStudio // aKkY

From "The Wrinkles of the City" project, a portrait from Carthagene, Spain | Photo: BasilicStudio // aKkY

Shanghai, two months after photo placed | Photo: Sabine Fricke

View of portraits on rooftops in Kibera, Kenya for the "Women are Heroes" project. | Photo: BasilicStudio // aKkY

City Beautiful: Bikes Continued

Inspired by Amy’s post, I decided to seek out a project I heard about a while back from various different sources. Bicycle Portraits is an effort to photograph “everyday South Africans and their bicycles.”

As someone who has traveled to and around South Africa a total of four times since 2005, I can say that biking has definitely become more popular in the past six years. On my first visit to Cape Town it would never have occurred to me to bike between the picturesque and disheveled neighborhoods that characterize that city full of paradoxes. But this time around (I just returned from two weeks there last month) I was close to astonished by how many people I saw biking around not just for pleasure but as what seemed like a growing form of transportation.

With that in mind, this project will (hopefully) grow in popularity with bicycles themselves!

- Ariana