Final Show Countdown!

We are not posting as regularly as we’d like to, simply because things are getting unusually hectic as we have a rather ambitious plan for the show (opening 22nd September), and for the London Design Festival. All I can say is that we are attempting to create ‘A Proposal for an Alternate, Augmented Ecosystem‘, worded nicely by Chris Hand, our newest team member.

Meanwhile here are some extracts from our email exchanges (in no particular order), just to give you a flavour of where we are at:

From Charlie on 18th August: “…Anab and I have been door to door trying to find apple trees but it was a somewhat, er, fruitless endeavour (if one in 10 houses has an apple tree and 3 in 10 people are at home at 11am on a Saturday morning in mid august that means if you knock on a door you have a 3% chance of finding a tree). But we now have a couple of posters. how cool are they? ‘Report a tree - Win a Giant Pie’ - that is a message people need.”

From Darryl on 14th August: “The hills are alive….Scene 1 Summer: Mountain is wheeled through the streets of the city. A sleeping giant. It compliantly takes its place among towers on the burning bitumen of the urban heat island that is our contemporary cityscape…”

From Chris Hand on 19th August: “Got a proper radio controlled thing in the post today, and went to get it filled with helium (I’m getting to know the lady in the party supplies shop quite well now…) Good news is that it’s WAYYYY more buoyant than any of the other balloons I tried…”

From Liam Young on 11th August: “… this narrative device could be interesting for us. We could take about our community and their suburb with the language of a description of a picturesque garden, a landscape painting or the romantic poets…”

From Tessy on 11th August: For me probably the biggest *concept* around here is a substantial blurring of boundaries - between home/work, private/public, owned/shared, passive/active…. How could we present these complete shifts in thinking and behaving. I can almost see us living in a much more fluid state…”

From Sanjiv Sharma on 20th August: “Lets start from the beginning… To look attractive with all that fluorescent colour and colourful we will need it to have a part of the DNA sequence called the plasmid that form the pigment cells in colourful fish…”

From Chris Collett on 25th August: “I think the proper theme for an introductory text, is not the inner substance of our future community, but the ecological/social/philosophical problems of the economy and society from which we are trying to escape, and how it propels us, individually and collectively, towards this better future; indeed, how every human being must be so propelled sooner or later…”

Anab Jain on 11th August: “…about the ‘time frame’ for this future, to say how we have sort of purposefully decided not to situate our future in a particular year - say 2022. And why. I think we decided not to do so because the word ‘future’ will always remain relatively abstract - while here we focused a lot more on what we want, and how we want to go about it, rather then ‘when’ we want it.”

Graham Burnett on 29th July: “Using real branches will be challenging as the leaves will droop very soon after the branch being cut from the tree, within hours if not sooner… I have a family apple tree in my forest garden, and would like to graft more in the spring, maybe we could do that as a ‘Power of 8′ related spring project???

The tube map of convergence

Here’s the map of our post-psychogeographies, which was also exhibited as part of the Open Weekend. It is a map showing where our ideas traveled and paths coincided. All these ideas have resulted in a rather exciting collective vision, with sufficient doses of lyrical realism and enchanting ambiguity. We are now in the process of making them tangible for the final show, and will keep updating our sketches as and when possible. (click to see larger view)