Utopian Protagonist
by smizz
created by.
Smizz
location.
sheffield
keywords.
not for sale: 2
Not for Sale: 2
Interested in not exactly the situation itself but in the flow of communication in the spaces between. My practice seeks to enlighten the aggressive process of the displacement of the poor and working class residents of Sheffield in and around the city centre, in favour of luxury apartments that will attract the highly taxable professionals and businesses. It is important to note at this point, that this project could work for most UK cities, and indeed globally, but Sheffield is a hardcore representation.
My interventions are site specific, requiring a spatial engagement with the city and a historical context. Applying the ?New York New York [Las Vegas hotel]? formula to Sheffield I am trying to clue into the exposure of the discontinuations in the systems that surround us, the gaps and the relationships among them. Furthermore, with the city becoming a commodity I am able to show how hard it is to separate the real from the hyper real. Importing loaded spaces and buildings into bleak environments, a conscious decision to explore the commodity and emphasis a promise, or rather the missing promise. The deconstruction and construction of history and the implication of the new sort of social space is created, if only in one moment.
The politics of a site-specific practice, helps to replace these false hoods of gentrification and regeneration, by replacing them with my own idealised topography of intrinsic and extrinsic space in which discourse and matter are categorically opposite. The action is illegal ? it illuminates no legal issues, calls for no ?rights?. It is pre-emotive and insurrectionary.
Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion. -Ellipsis, Jacques Derrida
The repetition of fly postering posters amuse with the influences of graphic design, for branding purposes but, to merge in, and dissent of a language of the public spectacle, consumerism and fashion to mold into the everyday city commodity of a mainstream spectacle.
Becoming an interventionist artist, my work seeks to provoke a public debate about gentrification, regeneration, identity and the political economy of the 2000?s world, not just societal but also within the art world. My audience are mere passersby that are greeted with a patchwork of wheat-pasted posters extolling squatted buildings, and current construction sites, denouncing the free market policies and fake architecture companies building amazing looking buildings, and above all seeking to raise the consciousness of Sheffield residents who are unwittingly, or simply indifferently, contributing to the destabilization of one of the most brilliantly different architecture areas and culturally diverse working class area in Sheffield and indeed the UK. Consciously, I am trying to reach everyday working people and the non-art public, to address the negative impacts of this business venture has.
Theorist Stephen Wright describes the interventionist as an ontological secret agent who is forced to don multiple identities: artist/activist, theorist/practitioner, participant/viewer, organizer/organized. No doubt the interventionist curator will find such ontological fabrication indispensable.
Romancing with? the street? as distribution site, I standing before the increasingly delimited horizon of global capital I can think of nothing for an institutional venue, no matter how theoretically astute or politically committed they may be, to effectively show my work and help intervene within the broader social sphere. That is why it is out in the public sphere, and has a website ? to manipulate new communications, the politics of numerous spaces and further this confusion with the real and fake.
In conclusion in creating a parody, we reveal the distortion of everyday and our foundations of a community. Both artistically and societal.
www.utopianprotagonist.co.uk
Interested in not exactly the situation itself but in the flow of communication in the spaces between. My practice seeks to enlighten the aggressive process of the displacement of the poor and working class residents of Sheffield in and around the city centre, in favour of luxury apartments that will attract the highly taxable professionals and businesses. It is important to note at this point, that this project could work for most UK cities, and indeed globally, but Sheffield is a hardcore representation.
My interventions are site specific, requiring a spatial engagement with the city and a historical context. Applying the ?New York New York [Las Vegas hotel]? formula to Sheffield I am trying to clue into the exposure of the discontinuations in the systems that surround us, the gaps and the relationships among them. Furthermore, with the city becoming a commodity I am able to show how hard it is to separate the real from the hyper real. Importing loaded spaces and buildings into bleak environments, a conscious decision to explore the commodity and emphasis a promise, or rather the missing promise. The deconstruction and construction of history and the implication of the new sort of social space is created, if only in one moment.
The politics of a site-specific practice, helps to replace these false hoods of gentrification and regeneration, by replacing them with my own idealised topography of intrinsic and extrinsic space in which discourse and matter are categorically opposite. The action is illegal ? it illuminates no legal issues, calls for no ?rights?. It is pre-emotive and insurrectionary.
Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion. -Ellipsis, Jacques Derrida
The repetition of fly postering posters amuse with the influences of graphic design, for branding purposes but, to merge in, and dissent of a language of the public spectacle, consumerism and fashion to mold into the everyday city commodity of a mainstream spectacle.
Becoming an interventionist artist, my work seeks to provoke a public debate about gentrification, regeneration, identity and the political economy of the 2000?s world, not just societal but also within the art world. My audience are mere passersby that are greeted with a patchwork of wheat-pasted posters extolling squatted buildings, and current construction sites, denouncing the free market policies and fake architecture companies building amazing looking buildings, and above all seeking to raise the consciousness of Sheffield residents who are unwittingly, or simply indifferently, contributing to the destabilization of one of the most brilliantly different architecture areas and culturally diverse working class area in Sheffield and indeed the UK. Consciously, I am trying to reach everyday working people and the non-art public, to address the negative impacts of this business venture has.
Theorist Stephen Wright describes the interventionist as an ontological secret agent who is forced to don multiple identities: artist/activist, theorist/practitioner, participant/viewer, organizer/organized. No doubt the interventionist curator will find such ontological fabrication indispensable.
Romancing with? the street? as distribution site, I standing before the increasingly delimited horizon of global capital I can think of nothing for an institutional venue, no matter how theoretically astute or politically committed they may be, to effectively show my work and help intervene within the broader social sphere. That is why it is out in the public sphere, and has a website ? to manipulate new communications, the politics of numerous spaces and further this confusion with the real and fake.
In conclusion in creating a parody, we reveal the distortion of everyday and our foundations of a community. Both artistically and societal.
www.utopianprotagonist.co.uk
