Notes#011

A performance done in October 2009 at Avenida dos Aliados, Praça da Liberdade and Largo dos Lóios - Porto by the name Coreto. An ephemeral piece made out of cardboard that echos those structures of Porto's Romantic gardens, once filled with the music of local brass bands are nowadays quite abandoned. This intervention was made in the context of an educational project - Artistic Interventions in Public Spaces and Site Specific work - by André Silva, Cláudia Lopes, Dalila Gonçalves and Inês Gama.

you can see the original news in portuguese here

It seems that the bandstand had a programme with music and that interaction was the goal. Unfortunately I could not see if there was any, and of what kind. The truth is that this Avenue after being requalified three years ago have been the target of several artistic interventions that try a posteriori to inquire what has not been examined before the urban intervention: what was it used for and what can it be used for on an everyday basis.

you find in this blog my own investigation after the works were finished on how it was being used.

Notes#010

Signs of Revolt Bricklane 91 - Shop 14 / truman Brewery - London

Brian Holmes write on the catalogue that "all of the activists-artists in this exhibition, and probably most of the visitors as weel, took part somehow in the inspiring and dramatic events created by the movement of movements - events that started well before Seatle, for example at the Carnival against Capital in the city of London on June 18th 1999, or at any one of the surprising and often hilarious Reclaim the Streets parties... some of us will meet again and again beneath the teargas and water canons ... only to learn that the leader of our supposedly democratic countries cared nothing for the votes that were cast in the streets." meaning that new forms of protest have to be experimented?

View of the exhibition

Holmes also wrote about the role of art as offering a "foretaste of a better life" but also an incompleteness, which means "an invitation to participate ... the art of the protest movements mingles dream and reality, beauty and terror, and expresses a symbolic violence of a necessary break with society as it is, while never forgetting that the real violence continues."



Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army /CIRCA

"the decade to come will see the most passionate struggle of them all: the one that finally takes apart the neoliberal system, to invent a future that no one claims to own and that no one trades away for profit, a future that everybody can live with." and I would argue that this struggle has to be fought on everyday life and maybe it is through this scope that the 3 years art project of Sarah Cole in a primary school takes its most radical democractic patine

NEST LIFE