Utilitarian Dreams relocates to Havana

A year after the opening of the 'Utilitarian Dreams' exhibition in Brighton, the project relocates to Havana as a residency and exhibition for the duration of November 2006.  During the summer the artist and collaborator Tom Phillips has been working on new material for the Havana exhibition.

'Utilitarian Dreams' is a cross disciplinary research project between architects and artists based in the UK and Cuba. It is a branch of Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen’s (School of Architecture and Design) wider Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs) research into design strategies for reducing the ecological footprint of cities. The CPUL project has a number of qualitative and quantifiable research strands and 'Utilitarian Dreams' aims to investigate the qualities open space brings to cities by exploring the ways people experience and occupy it and furthermore means of representing these often temporal, personal and ephemeral qualities.

The title 'Utilitarian Dreams Practicalities and Poetics in Urban Landscapes' was suggested by Tom Phillips in 2004 when he and Andre Viljoen visited Cuba on a field trip named 'Second Sight'. 'Second Sight' revisited a number of urban agriculture sites previously investigated by Andre Viljoen during his first field trip to research urban agriculture in Cuba.

Tom Phillips new work for the Havana exhibition has been made during the summer of 2006 as a collaboration between the School of Arts and Communications (co-ordinated by Sue Gollifer) and the School of Architecture and Design. Tom Phillips worked directly with print makers Ray Dennis and Wayne Case to make two new silkscreen and mixed media prints, South London Dreaming and Drumflowers  - We can make tomorrow better, each addressing the research and exhibition differently.

South London Dreaming explores ways of representing personal experience and associations with place in time. One of our ongoing discussions is about how place may capture and reflect time and thereby acquire meaning, articulating this characteristic is of particular importance if we are to be able to communicate the non-physical impact of a concept like CPULs. South London Dreaming does this in a number of ways by employing a method of mapping. The work itself has developed over time, its base layer being a Map Walk drawing originally made by Tom Phillips in 1972. Onto this is inscribed his project of infinite duration “20 Sites n years” which since 1973 has annually documented 20 South London sites located on a route which describes as near a perfect circle, centred on his studio, as roads permit. “20 Sites n years” which has regular screenings at Tate Britain was one of the projects which initially led to us contacting Tom to discuss the CPUL project. As South London Dreaming continued it became evident that this image mapped an entire personal biography, including private and public associations with places, even the site of our meeting in July 2006 with Triangle Arts Trust and the British Council, who commissioned Utilitarian Dreams. The print’s sub title, 'life seen from above', makes reference to another CPUL interest, how optics and elevation alter the experience and reading of urban landscape.

The 'Drumflowers' print is more in the nature of a poster, specifically related to ideas noted during the 2004 field trip to Cuba, and explored in the 'Utilitarian Dreams' exhibitions. One of these is the notion that urban agriculture may be read and understood as a type of urban ornament. This proposition became clear when comparing photographic and drawn surveys of Cuban urban agriculture sites (called organoponicos) made in 2002 by Andre Viljoen and Tom Phillips’ A Summary Treatise on The Nature Of Ornament. This was first presented to the Architecture Forum of the Royal Academy of Arts in October 2002. Some descriptions in the Treatise could have been written as direct records of the structure of Cuban urban agriculture sites, as in:

7. This essence is the visual grammar of the ornament and has   prioity over any reference it encodes.

8. Such universality is made possible by the relatively small   generative syntax of ornament.

9. These syntactical elements are all paraphrases of nature;   stripe, hatching, dot and the whole treasury of primal signs   are all present in nature.

48. It stores our knowledge of the principles of growth and form   (forking, branching, spiral) and diagramatises our experience.

50. It embodies our philosophical enquiries as to the nature   of nature; exemplifying in this instance Plato’s Theory of Forms.

Paragraph 50 relates most closely to the print, which shows six 'Drumflowers', entirely utilitarian devices planted within organoponicos. These ends of fifty gallon oil drums, smeared with grease act as passive insect traps. They could also be read within the urban agriculture landscape a kind of urban sculpture, individually as abstract paintings or something you could imagine Mirro or Calder making. Or are they a representation of a flower as a Platonic Form?

A road side slogan has been placed at the bottom of the 'Drumflowers' print, translated from it’s original Spanish it reads: “we can make tomorrow better.” This is a slogan Tom Phillips has chosen for its measured optimism “we can” being significant, refraining as it does from the desire to assert an unconditional “we will”.

'Utilitarian Dreams' in Havana is funded by Triangle Arts Trust as part of their international residency programme in Cuba, Proyecto Batiscafo. Further support from the project comes from the British Council and the University of Brighton’s School of Architecture and Design.

As part of Proyecto Batiscafo, Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen are undertaking a month long residency in Havana during November 2006, they are the first architects to be invited to participate in a residency. They will work alongside Cuban artists Fidel Garcia, Pavel Acosta, Alenjandaro Gonzalez and curator Yuneikys Villalonga. Tom Phillips and Glenn Longden-Thurgood (School of Architecture and Design) are contributing work for the exhibition, which concludes the residency.