There has also been another slight change to the afternoon section of the programme.  Unfortunately, Nicola Martin is unable to lead the Banks and Buskers tour, so artist Catriona Stamp will be taking over and providing her own unique perspective on the Fishergate area of Preston.

So, it finally looks like everything is ready for Wednesday.  It promises to be an interesting and enjoyable event (and the lunch should be good too!).

Speaking of which, we have recently been reading Massey’s 2005 book, For Space.  The chapter on “The Elusiveness of Place” is particularly relevant to the ideas that we hope to explore in the symposium.  Within this chapter, Massey describes place as a collection of “stories-so-far”:

“One way of seeing ‘places’ is as on the surface of maps: Samarkand is there, the United States of America (finger outlining a boundary) is here. But to escape from an imagination of space as surface is to abandon also that view of place.  If space is rather a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space.  Their character will be  a product of these intersections within that wider setting, and of what is made of them.  And, too, of the non-meetings-up, the disconnections and the relations not established, the exclusions.  All this contributes to the specificity of place.” (130:2005)

Recent Findings is the British premiere of Simon Faithfull’s current work. Launching on 27 March 2010, the exhibition is curated by the Harris Museum & Art Gallery and presented as part of the Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival. AND is a new festival presented by folly, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) and Cornerhouse that welcomes audiences to experience the best in new cinema and digital culture.

Faithfull works predominantly in drawing, video and installation, often using different technologies to record his surroundings. It will be the first time these pieces have been exhibited in the UK and includes the newly commissioned projection work, A Murder.

Faithfull’s work continually questions, measures and tests his own experience of the world. These investigations result in fascinating artworks and include his newest piece, the film 0˚00 Navigation (commissioned by Landscape and Arts Network Services), an intriguing and obsessive journey exactly along the Greenwich Meridian from Peace Haven in Hampshire to Cleethorpes in Lincolnshire. A solitary figure is seen using a GPS device to follow the exact line of longitude, negotiating all obstacles encountered – climbing through windows, wading through streams and crawling through hedges.

Another insight into Faithfull’s journeys includes the video-work Aurora Borealis (Unseen), in which a record of the artist’s 2006 trip to the Arctic Circle is seen via the reflections captured in a human eye. The footage records the strange location and scientific equipment witnessed whilst Faithfull waited unsuccessfully to experience the Northern Lights.

Other highlights of the exhibition include the premiere of A Murder, in which the crow images Faithfull regularly sketches on his palm pilot are brought together and displayed as they’ve never been seen before. The crows inhabit the streets and open spaces from cities in the UK, Canada, Spain, and Germany.  In each of these places Faithfull feels the society of crows mirrors the individual habits and manners of the people who also populate these cities. Collected together from many points of the globe these drawings will be projected on to the walls of the gallery, presenting an immersive installation and creating an unfeasible murder (flock) of alien creatures. The installation will also reference its setting with the inclusion of a Preston crow.

It dates from 1899 and contains two shopping arcades in a cross shape . Unfortunately, due to the recession, many of the businesses which were based in the arcade have recently closed down, leaving only a few units occupied. 

This symposium has been developed by In Certain Places as a way to help us think about the role of public art within a globalised city.  Many of the ideas behind the symposium have come from the geographer Doreen Massey and her relational understanding of place.  Massey suggests that:

 ’The uniqueness of a place, or a locality [...] is constructed out of particular   interactions and mutual articulations of social relations, social processes, experiences and understandings, in a situation of co-presence, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are actually constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself …Instead of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings.  And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extra-verted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local.’ 
Doreen Massey, Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place in Bird, Curtis, Putnam, Robertson and Tickner eds., Mapping the Future: Local Cultures, Global Change, Routledge, New York, p.66.

This understanding of place as a relational entity is explored by urban planners Stephen Graham and Patsy Healey in relation to the planning of towns and cities.  They argue that “planning must consider relations and processes rather than objects and forms” and “stress the multiple meanings of space and time” (Relational concepts of space and place: Issues for planning theory and practice).