I have two art projects on the go at the moment, .inemptybuildings.org and 37 Million Plastic Bags.
.inemptybuildings will be an organisation which makes use of – you guessed it – empty buildings. Its the legitimisation of DA! which was took a much more direct approach to making use of empty buildings. DA! began in 2005 when Bogna and I squatted a 6 storey building on Kensington High St. We lived there for well over a year and during that time we converted a derelict old building into an exhibition space. We also had a cinema in the basement. We’d been inspired to do DA! as we’d met, and fallen in love, in a similar place in Paris called Chez Robert.
37 million plastic bags are distributed in London each week. I noticed this fact printed at the bottom of a recycle for London fabric bag. It struck me at the time that 37,000,000 is a phenomenal figure. Its a statistic that is beyond comprehension. I mulled this over for a few weeks and the idea came to mind that this stastic could be made real simply by amassing this number of bags. I’m in dialogue with a few people about collecting these bags. Most notably The GLA and Vivienne Westwood, via her active resistance blog. I don’t think its really that important for the people involved to appreciate this as a work of art. I believe it is though, because art has the ability to take abstract concepts and communicate them.
