After two weeks Let’s take a position had to find another place to stay. Enrico Vezzi and Anna Santomauro - from neon>campobase - have decided to donate the installation to the multicultural association Centro Zonarelli. On December 10, together with people from San Donato neighborhood, we moved the benches from Parco John Lennon Charlie Parker to the Centro Zonarelli garden, which is very very close. The installation remains public, and everybody can use it. Many thanks to all the people who helped us, it was such an amazing collaborative and metaphorical action.

November 26 at Parco John Lennon Charlie Parker in Bologna.

Project by Enrico Vezzi in collaboration with La Pillola
Curated by Anna Santomauro

Opening November 26th at 2:30 pm
Parco John Lennon Charlie Parker Via del Lavoro – Bologna (Italy)

Let’s Take a Position is the title of the intervention that the artist Enrico Vezzi has realized in collaboration with La Pillola at San Donato Neighborhood. The intervention is the result of a research carried out on two different levels: by studying the city and some of its specific areas and by investigating themes connected to ecology and nature in the public space. They both have been developed during the Green Days* nomad workshops held in 4 different countries.
Let’s Take a Position invites people to position themselves in the public space, considered as a house, as a place to belong and has a field of intervention.
Public space hosted Green Days workshops: basic deeds aiming at perceptive and emotive conquest of places have produced a deeper view on human and environmental contexts – both in a rural and urban dimension, through an intense dialogue among the participants and between participants and the surroundings.
Enrico Vezzi froze these moments in dozens of pictures, drawing time after time ideal lines of a new cartography of relationships and positions, analyzing the psychology of these connections and focusing on what Bateson has defined as “ecology of mind”.
“What can we learn from nature?”, a question that has become the leitmotiv of the Green Days project, thus turns into “What can we learn from human beings and from the space?”, as they are an integral part of natural systems and as producers of ideas and thoughts.
The aim is to produce some micro-systems that mirror these positions, that the public can touch and use.
Some benches will be placed in the park: their position matches the position and the attitude that the workshop participants adopted during the moments in which they were talking and discussing.
The benches are mobile: whoever uses them will be able to transform the initial position, highlighting the fact that the simple and spontaneous act of using the space by choosing how to do it is a social and political act.
The benches’ shape is not only inviting people to sit down. Indeed these objects offer them a space for thinking and acting: people can write on their surface, or find some books inside of them, or read the details of the whole Green Days project on the bar codes.
Aware of the historical, social and cultural features of this place, we want this intervention to be an occasion to reflect on the concept of transparency and visibility, on the ecology of social relations and on the physical and cultural energy, the one that leads to transformation. After the two-weeks installation, the artwork will be
donate. People interested in it can send an email to annasantomauro83@gmail.com explaining how they mean to use it in an ecological way.

*Green Days is a multidisciplinary project based on the relationship between urban environment and nature, and on the possibility to “imitate nature” through biomimicry applied to the visual and performing arts in public space. The project involves four european non profit organisations devoted to contemporary art: neoncampobase (Bologna), AAA - Audiovisual Artists Anonymous (Brussels), Radar (Loughborough), Fabrica de Pensule (Cluj-Napoca). During spring, each partner will invite an artist to hold a workshop on site, reflecting on the role of nature and green areas in the urban texture, walking throughout the city in order to carry out a social and urban nomad survey. Green Days is going to contribute to the creation of mental and physical spaces devoted to knowledge sharing and to the experience of collaboration.

Green Days is a project by Viviana Checchia and Anna Santomauro

Supported by European Cultural Foundation

LINK

Place Fontainasplein (Fontainas square) is a site of intersection between different neighbourhoods, cultures and social groups. It is situated between the Anspach and Lemonnier Boulevards, the major boulevards that succeed each other to connect the North with the South, and the adjacent Fontainas Park, which forms the only public green space in this North-South axis.

Due to its location, the Fontainas square is used by a population of great diversity. Previously known as Eilandje (Small Island) because the river Senne/Zenne used to split here and came together a mere 65 meters further, forming thus a small island, the Fontainas square denotes nowadays a transition from the more central areas, such as the Bourse/Beurs, the commercial Dansaert street and the lively quarter of Saint-Gery/ Sint-Goriks, to the gay friendly cafés of the Marché au charbon/Kolenmarkt and the low-income, prominently Muslim residential parts of the Anneesseens quarter towards the south.

LINK creates a temporary physical connection between the Fontainas square and the Fontainas park. Physically, the two are separated by a small street, while an imposing building almost hides the park from the passersby on the Anspach. However, the low interaction between them is not so much due to those physical boundaries. Despite their proximity, square and park seem to have distinct and almost distant characters. 

Clearly belonging in the realm of the Anspach boulevard, the Fontainas square is more of a broad sidewalk, a busy passage, rather than a proper square. A “reluctant” square, built with concrete, with rows of plants and a few merely inviting sitting benches, it is not a public space keenly appropriated by the strollers. If urban identity can be formed through the meaning attached by the users of the city, then Fontainas still seems to be hesitating.

The park is a well gated green oasis with playground facilities, used mainly by the residents and the children of the neighbourhood that behind Anspach. The park’s multiple entrances allow people to come in from all sides. The only exception seems to be the entrance at the Anspach side, which remains quite hidden for passersby as a narrow corridor under the shadow of the high building (the headquarters of the public servants’ Union). Unfortunately, the park is not spared from other activities, like mugging or drug dealing, which find fertile ground at its most remote parts.

Despite recent transformations as well as the ongoing efforts of authorities and various non profits active in the neighbourhood, the park and the area still hold a reputation for being unsafe.

LINK departs from all the above observations and wishes to bring change in this disconnection. It opens up the normally gated side of the park that faces the Anspach Boulevard, it continues over the small street that separates them and arrives at the square. 

By extending the limits of both the park and the square, LINK aims to launch a debate on a potential redefinition of this urban site. It shows that a connection between square and park, those neighbouring but nevertheless distant worlds, is possible. However, LINK does not claim to be a definite proposal for the site. It rather wishes to encourage residents and authorities to reflect upon this potential and envision a different, long-term approach for the site. LINK is therefore a starting point of a placemaking process, a proposition towards something else; why not, towards the possibility of Fontainas Island growing into a unique and green interlude in the central North-South axis of Brussels.

LINK demonstrates the continuous fluidity of a city like Brussels and through its physical presence proclaims that “There’s work being done here”. The use of scaffolding for its material refers to public works, and aims to trigger all sorts of associations to anyone crossing the site: change, evolution, restoration, starting of larger works, and the beginning of something new … Locals and passersby are in this way involved and mobilized for the possible change that LINK aims to bring in.

LINK is a test case. It will remain on site for a period of two months, from August to October 2011. These two months will be a period of constant reflection and investigation on the potential for a different urban approach and the possibilities of improvement that LINK aims to set forward in this site.

LINK is the Brussels/Belgian contribution to the European project Green Days which takes place this summer in four European cities and focuses on the relationship between urban and natural environment.

Green Days in Belgium is organised by the non-profit association AAA

LINK is designed by Wouter De Raeve, partner of Dees & Lepage Garden and Landscape Architecture Bureau, and is supported by the European Cultural Foundation (ECF).

LINK runs from August 12 to October 14, 2011

LINK, place Fontainasplein, 1000 Bruxelles/ Brussel

Tram 3 & 4, stop Anneessens, exit Fontainas

Info:

http://www.deeslepage.be/en/projects/greendays.html 

http://www.artanartist.org 

Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=115753715187853 

The day the sky opened in Cluj. After a tour and discussion at the botanical garden, the cycle to the forest was rescheduled as Cluj was overtaken by wind, rain and hailstones, and talks carried on in various cafes, bars and restaurants across the city.

Exploring the buying and selling of produce in Cluj, through market trading and capitalist intervention. A tour of the city led by Fabrica de Pensule, travelling by bicycle across the terrain.

A walk around the village of Wymeswold with Georgina Barney, exploring how the country side is sold. A visit to a local butcher, church, pub, livery and a view of the battery chicken farm.

Some photos from the first and second day in Loughborough with Georgina Barney. Day one included some poetry reading near the edge of Georgina’s village of Wymeswold. Day two saw the group go to Pat Stanley’s farm, where they breed prize cattle for show.

Some pics of Green Days Workshop in Cluj-Napoca. Thank you Fabrica de Pensule!