Bread&Games, Plant&Play
Participatory project in public space and at the Tate Gallery Liverpool (2004)
Commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial, UK
Bread and Games, Plant and Play investigates the interaction of formal and informal systems in the process of urban revitalization. It is meant to provoke a set of questions to which the community would find their own answers and solutions. Plastic boxes in the Biennial logo colors were displayed as units to facilitate the exchange of goods, ideas, or skills; or they could serve as event infrastructure. In the initiating event, people from the local community were invited to take away boxes of soil and seeds and encouraged to return with their “grown-up” vegetables to the final cooking event. New boxes were supplied every week to the community park. While the planners did harbor some scenarios, the project was open to take any number of unexpected directions. The community soon began to collect boxes, making them into a kind of new currency in the area.
The local project team tried to bring this taking of the boxes under control. The shift from artist-observer to a controller role culminated in a dangerous power conflict with the local hooligans, forcing the project manager to involve the police. As all the boxes were taken, the social sculpture evolved in the dematerialization of the physical installation and its re-materialization through use and misuse. The empty box was a metaphor for the lack of ideas and tools for addressing community problems. It became a tracking device for the community’s passiveness and the inability of social institutions to break out of their established methodologies. The uncertainty of the final goal and the lack of the “final sculpture” interjected an aesthetically and sociologically interesting instability into the established system of relationships between artists and parts of the community. Yet, the creative appropriation of the hooligans as project photographers not only reversed assumed hierarchies, but transformed the notion of control into collaboration, creating a fragile yet real mutual respect.
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Project commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial 2004 for the International Exhibition, curated by Paul Domela.
Materials: 1000 plastic boxes, 500 bags of soil, 100 vegetable seeds, international recipes
Dimensions: 30 x 50 x 45 cm
Concept and artistic direction: Azra Akšamija
Research and development: Andreas Mayer, Brian Melcher (conceptual contributions)
Production: Rebecca Reid, Sue Wrigley (project management and implementation); Munira, Ibrahim, and Enes Akšamija, Marc Daniels, Adrian Devers, Paul Domela, Sharon Paulger, Rebecca Reid, Cath Stevenson, Sue Wrigley (event production); Julie Anderson (sociologist evaluation); Really Useful Products Ltd (boxes production); Lady Green Nursery (plants and compost)
Photographs: Jessie Blindell
Special thanks: David Rhöse, Nadja Akšamija