projects
Rural Cultures Informing Regenerative Visions
Berwick Visual Arts. Northumberland. Uk / October 2019
An ongoing collaboration with BVA:
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 alternative
and supported sustainable visions.
Rural and peripheral areas are going through a transition phase. Everything is in a state of becoming, that state of contingent potentiality begging to have new meanings projected onto it.
Weaving Ecologies
Swedish Lapland Air, Norrbotten. Sweden / 2019
Crafting a mobility program for an emerging cultural platform in Norrbotten, Sweden. A twofold project in the making focussing on traditional practises in the nordic context.
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.Triggering collaborative interventions situated in the local and global context through a diversity of practices and disciplines that can open meaningful connections and routes to make sense for sustainable futures is key.
Artist Carlos Monleon is invited to develop a project with the Local weavers association of Arvidsjaur inspired from his ongoing interest in Sauna culture. "Water Weaves"seeked to design and produce the textile works through dialogue. This dialogue aiming to bridge contemporary sensibilities with traditional crafts, a reinterpretation of the landscape through the weaving hands of it inhabitants.Water Weaves aimed to revalue the work of these craftspeople, by entering the works and their makers in a wider economy of distribution and also of visibility and exposure.
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.
A Workshop in 3 stages:
1 The Hearth: building a cob oven and traditional
ceramic kiln.
2 Contrivance: ceramic workshop drawing from local heritage and culinary culture. The items will be fired in the kiln constructed at the previous stage.
3 Edibles: Triticum Dicoccum (emmer wheat): brief history and bread making workshop.
The bread will be baked in the cob oven followed by a food feast using the university’s produce. Food will be served in the utensils created on previous stage of the exercise.
The workshops will be co-lead by ST and Eparkeia Koinsep.
Eparkeia Koinsep is a social cooperative enterprise based in Xanthi, Thrace, dedicated to promote self sufficiency and sustainability with food and energy as its core practice.
Together with cultivating organically Triticum Dicoccum (emmer wheat), they’ve developed and constructed their own peeling equipment and grinding stones specifically tailored for this heritage grain.They also operate a
ceramics studio where production of ceramics and workshops are held.
Hand Head Heart: Community integration project
Arvidsjaur Kommune. Sweden. Nov 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 craft-holders 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.
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.
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.
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 house Lower Hewood Farm’s growing collection of books, films, magazines and journals. The design used materials that could be locally sourced: shelving and felt-clad alcoves inspired by the functional design principles of Alexander Rodchenko’s ‘Design for a Workers Club’, 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.
