GroundWork Gallery AER Resident Announced
- Written byPost-Grad Community
- Published date 23 July 2021
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Rebecca Faulkner, MA Architecture student at Central Saint Martins has been selected for the AER Residency at GroundWork Gallery, Norfolk.
Set up by Professor Lucy Orta UAL Chair of Art for the Environment - Centre for Sustainable Fashion in 2015, The Art for the Environment International Artist Residency Programme (AER) provides UAL graduates with the exceptional opportunity to apply for short residencies at one of our internationally renowned host institutions, to explore concerns that define the 21st century – biodiversity, environmental sustainability, social economy, and human rights.
GroundWork Gallery Extraction residencies 2021 is organized in association with EXTRACTION: Art on the Edge of the Abyss, a multimedia, multi-venue, cross-border art intervention which seeks to provoke societal change by exposing and interrogating the negative social and environmental consequences of industrialized natural resource extraction.
Rebecca will have the opportunity to work in partnership with a multi-disciplinary study group including Norfolk Geodiversity and Norfolk Coast Partnership (funder), plus Like Minds Norfolk, & GroundWork Gallery team to work on local and/or global issues in connection to extractivism, specially of stones and sands around Norfolk.
Read Rebecca's successful proposal:
My self defined practice sits between the world of performance, movement work and architecture, which gives me a unique perspective for the AER residency. Throughout my time at Central Saint Martins (CSM), my work has made the invisible visible. Whether through choreographing performances that highlight and disrupt legacies and spatial codes of the city or immersive spoken word pieces about the destructive social and environmental consequences of global sand mining.
Inspired by artists such as Laura Wilson, whose work is concerned with history and labour in site-specific locations. My ongoing working relationship with Theatrum Mundi, a research centre based in London and Paris, has been incredibly fruitful - collaborating on their Choreographing the City project and introducing me to a network of practitioners beyond architecture. It has also lead to publishing opportunities, research and reflections on my performative spatial work. The Act of Loitering: a City Awakening is featured in You Are Here Journal’s 2021 issue Bodies and Politics and resulted in a commission for new work for Theatrum Mundi edition, Embodying Otherness, a research theme I authored whilst interning for them.
Whilst I think it is important to frame this work within the larger artistic context, I believe we cannot forget the spatial implications of extraction and exploitation, which feeds the built environment. Whilst at CSM, I have deployed performative thinking in many forms: as an epistemology, as a research methodology, as a metaphor, as a design tool, and as a form of resistance. For me, performing is crucial to the fabric of urban life, a mechanism for collective identity to be played out in public, where people, objects, animals, insects, and land connect in a shared moment. Through The Act of Loitering, I first came to sand as a medium. Sandbags were reimagined as performative props. Giant, wearable versions were fabricated to both constrain and liberate. The weight designed to restrain their female handlers’ bodies, momentarily gifting Loitering. This performance gave meaning to a highly deterred act, offering a new vision for protecting and celebrating stillness across the city.
A continued fascination with sand has meant that over the past 18 months I have become an arenophile understanding how sand is a metaphor for modern-day consumption. The global demand for concrete is growing exponentially. The worldwide price of construction sand has increased by 50% in the last decade. Globally, we now consume 50 billion metric tons of sand (and gravel) every year, amounting to 18kg per person per day, which incidentally is the weight of an optimally filled sandbag. My thesis, Sand and the City, simultaneously advocates for a counter prospect to London’s declining industrial landscape whilst promoting a more socially and environmentally sustainable construction process. It did not manifest through an interest in London’s industrial heritage rather I followed a grain of sand. This work was undertaken within the university setting, but the AER Residency at GroundWork Gallery would offer me the opportunity to showcase this publicly.
I already come to the residency with a focus on sand mining and extraction, but whilst this has mainly focused on London, the AER opportunity would allow me to return and work in my native Norfolk. Through a partnership with GroundWork Gallery I would be able to understand and reveal the exploitative process of sand-mining, but also of flint, chalk, and carr stone. I grew up on these very beaches, which not only are subject to coastal erosion but beach replenishment schemes which only act as a bandaid to Norfolk’s declining coastline. A circular process of offshore sand-dredging for construction leads to beaches vanishing and further dredging for beach nourishment only serves to perpetuate this, not to mention the suffocation of marine and beach life.
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Disobedient Grains. -
Extract from essay Hinterlands, is not history but herstory. -
Film Still - Sand and the City -
Stills from video on early research into sand. -
Takeover of Theatrum Mundi's digital space.
Concluding in early September, the last reaming months of my Masters in Architecture (MArch) presents a moment to realise the contextual landscape of my professional practice, communicating my research further afield and seeking new opportunities. I intend that a large part of the remaining course will be dedicated to creating a complex, site-specific performance, which hopefully would be in partnership with AER and GroundWork.
I am passionate about bringing the issues surrounding sand extraction into the fore (which aligns with the core issues of AER), and re-contextualising already comprehensive research to respond in a new setting. Site-specific research could be undertaken before the residency as well as the drafting of the performance (including open calls if need be to maximise production time). I have previous experience of working within a two week project time frame. The MArch symposium at CSM in February 2021 saw the formation of WARM EARTH LAB, a research collective I co-founded. Our practice converged around contested landscapes and value-based systems. This two-week sprint saw the creation of new research collecting WARM DATA, an open resource/archive and creating a legal framework for awarding non-human bodies rights (performed in our film Hinterlands: Unearthing the character of sites beyond view). Environmental Personhood is an existing legal concept that grants certain environmental entities the status of a legal person. Currently, there are no set guidelines, but we proposed a set of criteria that could become a framework to obtain this status. The AER residency proposal will call for an ethical reorganisation of human-non-human relationships, we should encourage introducing a sense of a deeply embedded civic custodianship of the land.
Fundamentally, I enjoy making provocative performances that encapsulate complex issues into digestible and emotive formats. I believe the opportunity to work with AER, GroundWork Gallery and Like Minds, Norfolk could have a meaningful impact on both the art and architecture world in Norfolk and beyond.
