Fieldworks: Situated Practice in Art and Architecture

Fieldworks: Situated Practice in Art and Architecture

This exhibition showcases site-based and location inspired art and design responses to the built environment.  

It takes as its premise that architecture needs to begin with ‘being there’ in relation to the complex histories and spatial dynamics of the places it inhabits. 

Fieldworks affirms observation and engagement practices to develop critical and responsive interventions in chosen sites and with associated participants. 

In ecology, the quadrat is thrown at random into a sampling area that is to be observed, such as an area of vegetation on the ground, and then the organisms found there are counted and plotted. A quadrat, the gridded frame used in ecology to gather data on distribution and frequency of species in a measured area, gives the metaphor to this exhibition.  

Our curatorial quadrat for this show has counted a predominance of text and sonic works in our sample. We have also cast our quadrat further afield with collaborations with universities in the southern hemisphere and showcase here two installations as part of ongoing research collaborations with the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa and Melbourne University, Australia. By doing so, we created congruences and conversations and invited the post-colonial critiques of the center and periphery regarding land use and site response. Both collaborations have in common the curiosity about the potential for creative research methodologies to support social justice in the built environment.   

This show is hosted by Situated Practice MA at the Bartlett School of Architecture, an interdisciplinary course focusing on site, combining research and practice methods from art and architecture. Participants may be interested in curatorship, public engagement, event design, creative regeneration, participation design, site-writing, filmmaking and other disciplines. An important premise of our approach is that we begin with the site. In many ways this involves front-loading the work onto what might be passingly identified as the site survey in architectural design but which within situated practice takes on a more significant role. By bringing an ethical attention to our relation the already ongoing and given constituents of a place and the agencies, human and non-human, that inhabit it, and simultaneously reflecting upon our own positionality, we support an approach that can mitigate against some of the hubris of architectural design. 

The works include: 

• A quadrophonic sound installation made with hydro phonic field recordings from along the Thames.
• A live stream event of field recordings between Johannesburg, South Africa and London.
• A film reel of South African artists working in relation to site. 
• An installation work ‘in-Commons’ that invites the audience to build their own reader from texts on common land and creative commoning. 
• An archive table display of artists’ book works that explores writing ‘in common’ 
• A listening device used to amplify the experience of sound in urban spaces
• Vinyl records with sonic interpretations made from tree-ring patterns of felled tree stumps in the city.   

The collaborative projects are presented by the current cohort with University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa and The University of Melbourne, Australia, and selected work by graduates of the Situated Practice MA at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.