projects
Rural Cultures Informing Regenerative Visions
Berwick Visual Arts. Northumberland. Uk / October 2019
A collaboration with The Maltings. ( formerly BVA)
A preliminary fieldwork exploring potentialities and creative resources in Berwick upon Tweed for Berwick Visual Arts. Bringing a clearer vision to process sustainable working models based on rural residencies.
3 questions in mind:
- Sense of Place
- Attitudes to Nature
- Art practices activating sustainable visions.
The first iteration was about meeting and identifying creative practitioners and doers working in and around Berwick Upon Tweed. Discussions around their work, potentials and desires for future expressions and collaborations was the central focus.
Weaving Ecologies
Swedish Lapland Air, Norrbotten. Sweden / 2019
A twofold project in the making exploring traditional textile techniques in the nordic context for an emerging cultural platform in Norrbotten.
Artist Carlos Monleon is invited to develop a project with the Local weavers association of Arvidsjaur, a village just below the arctic circle. Inspired from Carlos' ongoing interest in Sauna culture, the collaborative project aimed to design a series of hand towels and textile pieces to be utilised in public saunas.
A reinterpretation of the landscape through the weaving hands of it inhabitants. Bridging contemporary sensibilities with traditional crafts, Water Weaves intend to revalue the work of local craftspeople, by entering the works and their makers in a wider economy of distribution and also of visibility and exposure.
Sustainability involves practicing a novel understanding of the human place in the world. An understanding rooted in what we have inherited from the past and ways of doing embedded in the present context.
Geometries > Panacea
Athens, Greece / Spring 2018
The Onassis Cultural Centre in a project curated by Locus Athens aimed to reintroduce the Agricultural University to Athenians, inviting them to discover one of the country’s first academic institutions as a relevant and necessary oasis within the urban landscape. Soil, food, seeds, eco-systems will be some of the vital bi-products of research into the primary materials on hand. Academic knowledge, technological methodologies, agricultural practices will be understood through the prism of contemporary art.
Standart Thinking was invited to lead a program of workshops within Geometries exhibition. A threefold exercise exploring fundamental processes and interactions between food and eating: The hearth, utensils and edible matter.
Hand Head Heart: Community integration project
Arvidsjaur Kommune. Sweden. March 2017
An educational program advocating interrelatedness and community building. A scheme for cultural integration supported by Norrbotten Regional Council of Sweden in collaboration with Lomtrask108.
An exercise in community building using traditional handcrafts and practical skills as a catalyst for integration and cultural exchange. Special attention to the potential inherited within traditional methods of production as an added value for local economy was placed. The workshops were run in collaboration with local weavers and community members.
Experimentation and creative processes can result in the fulfilment of an inner urge to give form and permanence to ideas. It is an adventure that permeates one’s whole being allowing self confidence to grow.
ATTUNE / HARMONIC RECEPTIVITY
Standard Thinking responding to Luca Francesconi’s solo exhibition ‘Snake, rise, food outlets’. An intervention with sound therapist Marco Florio.
An intervention of sound within the physicality of Luca’s work at Jupiter Woods. Working with medium of sound frequencies the aim is to enhance the perception of space and body through this sensory experience.
A sequence of quartz crystal and Tibetan singing bowls are played, each one keyed to the energy centres of the body, where sound nourishes the nervous system. The Crystal singing bowls are composed of quartz crystals and have the ability to transform, store, and amplify energy.
Everything in the Universe has a vibration or frequency, including our physical body. A system in each living organism: flower, plant, cell, organ, has its own vibration. Thoughts, emotions, colour and sound also has its own specific pulsation. We experience and perceive them through our different senses and at different levels.
MOVE TOUCH TASTE
Friday Late at the V&A, London / January 2015
Standart Thinking in collaboration with Nissa Nishikawa provided the V&A Museum with sensory blindfolded journey through movement, awareness and consumption.
Participants will be guided through simple exercises to improve attention, presence and concentration, to heighten sensory awareness and to facilitate trust and community amongst a group of unknown people.
Blindfolded we will explore the smells, sounds, and feeling of the museum before sitting down to a tea ceremony with Japanese delicacies. We eat together and bringing full attention to what is consumed, and our presence there in a group of people, with a heightened appreciation for taste and how the food affects our body.
Food by Humio Tanga of Sho Foo Doh at Pacific Social Club. Sessions will each last approx. 30 mins with the first one starting at 6.30pm and then repeated throughout the night.
Survival Library / 2014
A project commissioned by Lower Hewood Farm. Dorset.
The Survival Library was a commission to re-design Lower Hewood Farm Library and house their growing collection of books, films, magazines and journals.
The design used materials that could be locally sourced: shelving and felt-clad alcoves inspired by functional design principles promoting the idea of productive leisure time and interdisciplinary research.
An aim of the library is to highlight links between creative practice and agroecology, and much of the literature is devoted to these subjects. Items include artist books, exhibition catalogues, psychoanalytic texts, poetry, self-sufficiency manuals, environmental philosophy, local history publications and farming textbooks. The DVD collection has developed around the Food & Farming Film Festival programme.
The Survival Library functions as a reading room with internet access, work stations and a DVD player. Anyone is welcome to visit the library by appointment.
