The Community Live in Nottingham
An exhibition in the form of a four week long workshop with Ethan Assouline, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, David Bernstein, Tenant of Culture, Cyrus Goberville, Philippe Hallais and Ruby Hoette.
The Community is currently presenting a four-week long workshop at the Bonington Gallery (situated within the Bonington building at Nottingham Trent University) that acknowledges and interacts with the surrounding educational context of the university. The Community Live in Nottingham exhibition evolves each week and the closing will become the opening of the show.
The Community is a Paris-based multidisciplinary art institute, established by a collective of eight in 2016. Tuukka Laurila (Founder and Director) explains how The Community’s methodology is being extended to the UK.
‘The Community Live in Nottingham is part of an ongoing exploration of actively studying The Community’s founding principles and values including multidisciplinary approach in emerging arts, inclusive alternatives for 'white cube' galleries, operating models as a small not-for-profit art institute, and collective working with a fundamental focus on community-based approach and collaboration. The Community’s vision offers an alternative to the traditional thinking where the different disciplines of art, fashion, design, publishing, and music are categorized independently.’
Laurila elaborates, ‘The title ‘The Community Live in Nottingham’, takes inspiration from the phenomenon where musicians and bands go to a particular country, place or location to work on a project. It reflects how The Community is dynamic and local where it appears, and adapts together with the surrounding people to the new environment to continue its practice while The Community is simultaneously highly influenced by that specific location, time and surrounding energy.’
In 2017, The Community developed their collective installation for the Umwelt Mode exhibition in Basel. With curator Thomas Jeppe, they decided to work with four artists - two with an artistic background and two a fashion design background. Through a dialogue with the artists about the show and the location, pieces were selected and artworks were received from all artists in advance, to create an installation for the exhibition as a collective. The Community took its inspiration from Adventure Playgrounds:
“Adventure Playgrounds (different names in different countries) are a long-going Central-European tradition in which children are given the opportunity to build a playground as they see the best fit. In many ways, they are the antithesis of many contemporary structures (economic, political and social) as adventure playground lack of any logic or planning with the only rule being adult supervising to keep the structures safe. Some of these playgrounds have been going for decades (such as Kolle 37 started in 1990 in Berlin). These structures are great examples of what open-minded, not-over thought creation can produce.”
Since 2016 The Community has established specific characteristics that are recognized from the outside in its working methods, aesthetics, and as well as artistic and curatorial direction. Laurila refers to The Community’s internal brief for the collective installation and collaboration, “The installation follows the rules of an adventure playground: anyone can build anything, together or alone. Everyone must participate.”
Collaborative to a point of folding in on itself, The Community Live in Nottingham brings these characteristics with it. The exhibition is divided into four perspectives, with each emphasized over a one week period.
He continues, ‘The themes are based on the concept and the proposed artists. Each week the exhibition reflects the previous week and continues to develop on top of the already existing work. The end result is open, and the show can take different directions based on the workshop participants.’
A diagrammatic layer cake documenting the residents of Nottingham, Ruby Hoette’s Pattern mapping Residency took place during the second week of the exhibition. Ruby explains, ‘I worked with Karen Harrigan (professional pattern-maker and cutter) and Dr. Juliette Kristensen (design researcher, writer, and historian) to re-imagine clothing as ‘landmarks' capturing each garment through the production of its pattern live in the gallery. Through these structural renderings of dress and the accompanying narratives that emerged through conversations, we gathered all the material for an alternative map of Nottingham. The garment patterns are displayed in the gallery until the end of the exhibition, after which they will be collated into a collective pattern sheet and publication.’
‘This process inverts the workings of the fashion industry, making public the mostly hidden process of pattern drafting and creating a collection from existing garments using their local significance as a leitmotif. It plays with the tensions and contradictions between individual expression, collective identity, mass-production and exclusivity that are inherently bound up in contemporary (fashion) culture.’
The exhibition provided Hoette with an opportunity for exposure of working processes that are often more siloed, ‘Rather than showing finished, static outcomes it allowed the audience and various community groups to become active collaborators in the experience and accumulation of content. The transformation of the gallery space into an active site of production as well as display allowed me to explore a new concept as part of visualizing fashion in context – a central theme in my practice.’
A Nottingham edition of Permanent Cuts, an experimental music session co-curated by Cyrus Goberville of Collapsing Market, will also feature a live performance by Philippe Hallais (created within the week of the Writer’s Club, in collaboration with Ethan Assouline) and thus completes the final layer of this, very much alive, exhibition.
Footnote:
The Community Live in Nottingham takes place 4th – 30th March 2019. With Ethan Assouline, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, David Bernstein, Tenant of Culture, Cyrus Goberville, Philippe Hallais, and Ruby Hoette, plus special guests.
For full artist and workshop details: www.liveinnottingham.thecommunity.io
