Survey: Recession Impacts

AQ’s 4th Recession Impacts Survey: now live
11th August – 19th September 2011

Following the publication of its three reports on the impacts of the recession on the cultural sector in 2009 and 2010, Arts Quarter is repeating its online survey a year on from conducting its third such survey in order to continue to plot the ongoing affects of the current economic climate on the arts.

Some 500 organisations took part in our last such survey and we hope that many more will do so this time in order to send a clear message to key decision makers about the current state of the sector, the implications of two waves of cuts in subsidy, falls in Local Authority support and the ongoing affects of the slow progression out of the economic downturn of the last three years.

Above all, this Survey seeks to provide an opportunity for arts organisations throughout the UK to benchmark their fundraising and wider income generation performance against their peers within their artforms and regions.

This year’s survey will also seek to gather reactions to the range of initiatives announced by DCMS, ACE and HLF to boost philanthropy, following on from AQ’s Philanthropy in the Arts Consultation conducted and published in March.

The findings of this Survey will be published free of charge in October 2011.

Arts organisations may take part in this research project by clicking here

Copies of the 2010 Report may be requested by clicking here

http://www.artsquarter.co.uk/recession4.html

Sound of Ebb: F…K RECESSION, I’LL TAKE A SHOWER.

Name: Fabio Coruzzi
Location: London
Link: www.fabiocoruzzi.com

[My name is Fabio Coruzzi , London based artist/printmaker, this is the sound of Recession that I want to submit. The only problem, it’s the file, I don’t know how to convert on AIFF or WAV format. The format I submitted plays on quicktime software. It has been recorded from a hidden mobile phone, it was the only available device because I was in the middle of nowhere in South Italy, in a 30 inhabitants village with no internet or phones..]

Title: F…K RECESSION, I’LL TAKE A SHOWER.
Description:
The sound of recession came up in a hot afternoon , in the middle of an Italian summer,.

Outside were 42 degrees and people were trying to relax and think about the nothingness, I was reading a newspaper, it was talking about recession and economic downturn. Just words after words, adding shambles to global chaos.

While I was thinking about in what kind of boat the world will sink,a friend of mine, a carpenter, decided that was it. He said: I don’t give a damn about, I don’t even know what you are talking about, I am just a worker with the a level, nothing more, you know what? I’ll go to have a shower to refresh myself and take a nap afterwards.

So I went to record his “indifference” about this world made of numbers, theories and phobias. He was incarnating the common sense through the hot environment of South Italy. He was singing while taking shower, because singing brings good mood and optimism…..

That was the sound of recession, a big interrupting noise followed by singing songs under a refreshing shower.

Workshop: Self-Evacuation for Londoners

Workshop:
Self Evacuation for Londoners
w/ Caspar Below (independent artist)
August 28th @ Volume, 8pm

In his presentation and workshop on self-evacuation for Londoners, Caspar Below will try to find out whether there are alternatives to authority-led evacuations in urban emergencies.

In his brief presentation Caspar will give examples of urban evacuations in recent history and outline the current plans for London.

This will be followed by a workshop where we will discuss different scenarios for London, as well as the option to take evacuation into our own hands. Time permitting we will carry out some practical exercises.

Caspar Below is an artist with an explorative interest in local histories, urban fault lines and relationships between communities and hierarchies.

Previous projects have involved audiences in re-enacting crowd control, finding new parent memories for orphaned family photos and answering a multitude of enquiries via text message as the SMS Oracle.

He set up pirate radio broadcasts in a Northern Irish village and used secret filming to map the no-go “aura” of governmental buildings by stepping into its sensitive zones. More recently he collected bad advice and disposed of them in a series of cleansing rituals.

http://www.casparbelow.com

Article: Slack, Taut and Snap

Slack, Taut and Snap: A Report on the Radical Incursions Symposium
27 August, 2009
published in MUTE
by Peter Conlin

“Where the recession opens up ‘slack spaces’ in the city, squatters and artists are sure to follow. Nowadays the apparatchiks of culture-led regen are hard on their heals. But what would a gentrification non-compliant occupation look like? Peter Conlin reports from St. Martin’s Radical Incursions symposium”

http://www.metamute.org/en/content/slack_taut_and_snap_a_report_on_the_radical_incursions_symposium

Sound of Ebb: Crisis, What Crisis?

Name: Carl Max
Location: London, UK.
Title: Crisis – What Crisis?
Year created: 2009
Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0

There is an old Buddhist adage that says;
“Before great good, comes great evil”
The impetus for creating this piece are the conflicting voices and sounds of the media (radio/TV/newspapers), and metropolitan life during this recessionary period.

I was also interested in the confusion between certain news bulletins, human anger, individual hopelessness and the confused cacophony emanating from city streets in England and in The USA.

The contrast between the sounds of impending doom coupled with an underlying sense of a potentially positive future are melancholic, strong and sometimes even funny.

Video: Penetration

Penetration
2006, 4min 19 sec; Format 16:9; Dimensions variable, Edition of 7
Lia Chavez
London, UK
www.liachavez.com

My current video practice explores a hallucinatory, sensation-centered view of space, time and the world in which chance apparitions and ephemera are elevated to the same status as solid, pictorial objects. I am interested in non-narrative, non-rational uses of video, employing it to depict intuitive, fictional and speculative events and the molten realities which emerge from them.

The video is entitled Penetration, (2006). Filmed in London’s Piccadilly Circus, this silent video depicts the deconstruction of capitalist icons by fragmenting familiar symbols and logos and reassembling them in a chaotic, mesmerizing visual collage. http://www.vimeo.com/5109503

Sound of Ebb: Ninth

Name: Daniel Mason
Location: London

Title: Ninth
Description:
The basis for my piece is the following days/weeks after the global recession hit. It was a time for recriminations, when the majority of banker were hate figures. I wanted to capture their feeling of hopelessness they must have felt and above all the feeling that the gravy train had ended, it was the death of the party. My piece captures the mood that the good times have ended. It uses a sample taken from a public train announcement, keeping only the words ‘i am very sorry’ evoking the commuters going to work and the feeling they must have had. They were alone and blamed by the world, an unimaginable situation.

Event: Object Swap 28.08.09 @ Volume

Thanks to: Olivia Hegarty + The Centre of the Universe

http://www.oliviahegarty.com/
http://thecentreoftheuniverse.org

Workshop w/ Jennie Savage 15.08.09 @ Volume

Nutopia workshop w/ Jennie Savage
August 15th, 2009@ Volume, 3pm

As cities become architecturally homogenised, “Nutopia” will ask, “What and where are our new Utopias?”

“Nutopia” follows a symposium of the same name organised by Jennie Savage as part of her project “The Arcades Project: A 3D Documentary” (www.arcadesproject.org). This workshop/ event proposes to develop and extend her investigation referencing ideas raised during the symposium and inviting people to work together collectively in a workshop style format to ask; what could be the “Utopia’s” of the 21c, how do we find them in architectural environments and potentially to critique the very idea of Utopian dreaming and suggest alternative terms or references.

The event will invite people to explore and question the idea that city centres are constructed as spaces of consumption and designed as areas with potential for economic growth; the redevelopment and ownership of cities by global corporations; the language of regeneration – place as a perceptual landscape informed by linguistic architecture; tensions between resistance and commodification and the possibility to reclaim cities and make visible non-economic exchange as a valuable part of our lives and communities.

During the event we will try to bring together, suggest and develop ideas and practices which may help to reclaim these spaces as human places.

Jennie Savage is an artist whose work explores the places between public spaces, town planning, constructed landscapes and the human story; the lived lives and personal narratives connected to those sites. Working through a process that uses archiving and intervention she seeks to map the other life of a place or community in order to reveal a complex situation, a micro- structure or simply document an unheard voice. She has worked extensively in the UK and internationally.

www.jenniesavage.co.uk

Event: Age of Stupid

Upcoming screening event: Age of Stupid

22nd August 2009, 8pm
On the roof of the Bootstrap building in Dalston – backdropped by the largest solar panel installation in London.
FREE in, popcorn and cheap bar.

Entrance to roof through reception (beside Cafe Oto)
The Print House
18 Ashwin St
Dalston
London E8 3DL

The movie is about climate change. A man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looks back at “archive” footage from 2007 and asks: why didn’t we do something when we had the chance?

more info here: http://www.ageofstupid.net/