RUTH EWAN:
DId you kiss the foot that kicked you?
INTERACTION
Artangel Interaction enables small groups of people drawn from a wide range of different communities to collaborate in participative projects with emerging artists. Taking place outside institutional settings, projects engage with temporary communities built through a patient process of discussion and creative exchange.
Artangel Interaction launched in 2006 with Nights of London a focus on the different people who work, wake and watch over our nocturnal city; those who drive the pulse of London while the rest of us sleep. Nights of London realised new projects including David Blandy's Radio Nights, Sarah Woodfine's When Night Draws in and Janice Kerbel's Nick Silver Cant Sleep, a play for BBC Radio 3 exploring the relationship between insomniacs and night-flowering plants.
Connecting these nocturnal strands, Sukhdev Sandhu's Night Haunts materialised as a series of monthly episodes on a specially designed website www.nighthaunts.org.uk. In collaboration with musician and sound artist Scanner and designer Ian Budden, Sandhu ventured across London after dark in the company of night cleaners, Samaritan call centres and the dedicated nuns of Tyburn who pray for the soul of the city twenty-four hours a day.
In 2007 Artangel Interaction produced the first Jerwood Artangel commission Ruth Ewan's Did you Kiss the Foot that Kicked You? a rush hour collision between London's commuters and its buskers, over a hundred of whom had integrated Ewan McColl's Ballad of Accounting into their morning and evening repertoires.
The new Artangel Interaction programme takes the language of articulation as a starting point, focusing on what interaction actually means for all involved. Future projects will draw out and highlight a process that allows communities to emerge organically through the creative exchange. Taking issues that are highly pertinent to our times, both politically and personally, these works thoughtfully play with notions of collaborative practice.
Future
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ceri Buck, Sarah Cole, Lucille Power and Charlotte Prodger explore the notion of the (TAZ) Temporary Autonimous Zone in relation to creative process and interaction, collaborating with cobblers, Loughborough Estate residents, young mothers, truckers and a silversmith they prepare the ground for a momentary creative uprising. Melanie Gilligan takes on economic anxiety and the current credit crunch working with a range of people involved in finance, from the lofty heights of hedge fund management to individuals affected by debt crisis. Karen Mirza and Brad Butler will explore how violence inherent in political structures is played out in social spaces working with Pakistani communities in Karachi and London and Emma Hedditch will chart the many interactions, often hidden, that take place as a project is realised in a specially designed social networking site involving participants, artists and Artangel employees.
