Popping-up on Saturday 11th July 2015, 12 – 5pm, on the Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground across from Tate Britain at Chelsea College of Arts, SW1P 4JU, #TransActing: A Market of Values will be a bustling market featuring 50+ stalls that creatively explore existing systems of evaluation and actively produce new ones. There will be a skillshare, a peoples bureau, organ donation, bricklaying, an economy of promises, commoners, a fablab, bring your own BBQ food, virtuous communities, a speakers' corner'even a kiosk buying tears. Multiple currencies will circulate, not all of them monetary. Whilst the values of competitive markets dominate contemporary life, including art and its education, other kinds can and do coexist. #TransActing will nurture and celebrate these other value relations in a spectacular one-day event.
CCW PhD student Fangli Cheng and MA Interior Spatial Design student Helen Brewer are two student participating in the event. Describing his contribution, Cheng said, ‘I think one of the values for this project is raising the question of design sustainability; how can we transform waste material into a new functional level. My personal research is concerned with the relationship between architecture and body- it engages with the functionality of architecture but addresses the question of how the architectural function might be understood as a choreographed or performed event. #TransActing is a way to challenge how to use the limited material to measure the body activity, and through the body concern, how to arrange a public ground as market town. In terms of the definition of “market” itself, our project will provide the varying values in the making of art, design, environmental conservation and the other meanings of social engagement.’
Brewer said, ‘My investigation into the politics behind “do-it-yourself” and its emergence as a counter form of labour and production celebrates the values found in the market's construction and re-use of salvaged materials. I am interested in the absorption and dissemination of information, particularly in the form of “zines” where skill shares, storytelling and documentation are passed to and fro freely in the activist network. My primary research takes place on an occupied and appropriated site outside London, where activists are protesting the build of a third runway at Heathrow airport. Self-building and ad-hocism have transformed the site into one of experimentation and resistance. As a result the stall I am building is linked to the practice of agitation. The structure will move around the market and function as a point of contact for information gathering and release. With a scribe to take down happenings – the information will be written on the structure as well as digitally fed to the outside. I would hope the function of the stall changes with the market, a live project activated by the people and events.’
‘Buddy can you spare a Time?’ Alternative currency designed by Neil Farnan, Metod Blejec and Neil Cummings
Follow Critical Practice and #TransActing on Facebook and Twitter. For the programme and contributors, visit www.criticalpracticechelsea.org.
Critical Practice is: Metod Blejec, Marsha Bradfield, Cinzia Cremona, Neil Cummings, Neil Farnan, Angela Hodgson-Teal, Karem Ibrahim, Catherine Long, Amy McDonnell, Claire Mokrauer-Madden, Eva Sajovic, Kuba Szreder, Sissu Tarka and many more besides.
#TransActing is organised by Critical Practice and designed in collaboration with public works. This project is part of Camberwell, Chelsea & Wimbledon (CCW) Graduate School's public programme.