We are working on a Parade Publication as a legacy project.
It will be 225 X 161mm and approx 80 pages.
There will be a DVD attached inside the covers.
It will be produced for December 2010

The Circular Artefact Working Group (moving image aspect)

will comprise:
Basia, Neil, Marsha, Scott, and Metod

The Rectangular Artefact Working Group (print aspect)

will comprise:
Coordinated by Neil, and Ken (Ken to contribute something on the development of the structure), Michaela, Cinzia, Marsha, Scott, Metod

We like the idea of a timeline, that could start with the picnic and the BIG IDEAS and incorporate all the research trips, Barcamps, workshops and key meetings. We though this would enable us to thread the intellectual and organizational development, through the evolution of the physical structure.

What follows is the draft timeline

Introduction

Critical Practice is a cluster of artists, researchers, academics and others, supported by Chelsea College of Art & Design, London.

Initiated in 2005, Critical Practice has explored new models for creative practice, and sought to engage those models in appropriate public forums, both nationally and internationally; we have participated in exhibitions and the institutions of exhibition, seminars and conferences, film, concert and other event programmes. We have worked with archives and collections, publication, broadcast and other distributive media; while actively seeking to collaborate.

Critical Practice have a longstanding interest in art, public goods, spaces, services and knowledge, and a track record of producing original, participatory events. So, an eighteen month research project resulted in PARADE

Chelsea College of Art and Design has a large contemporary courtyard at its heart: the beautiful Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground. We collaborated with Polish curator Kuba Szreder to develop a project to explore the diverse, contested and vital conceptions of being in public.

In a bespoke, temporary structure designed by award-winning Polish architects Ola Wasilkowska and Michał Piasecki - assembled in public - we produced a landmark event in an amazing location with a host of international contributors.

PARADE challenged the lazy, institutionalised model of knowledge transfer - in which amplified 'experts' speak at a passive audience. Our modes of assembly, our forms of address and the knowledge we shared was intimately bound.

This is a document of the evolution of PARADE, and part of its legacy.

Annual Picnic 26th June 2008

Throughout 2008, Critical Practice responded with enthusiasm to a number of invitations and opportunities to contribute to art, its discourses and organization. From participating in events such as Systems Art at the Whitechapel, the distributed London Festival of Europe and Disclosures convened by Gasswork London, these engagements provided a stimulating context in which to practice critically. Although invigorating, the downside of responding to theses immediate 'event-in-hand' left us feeling exhausted, and often challenged in terms of commitment.

While we intend to remain engaged it felt important for Critical Practice to develop some self-initiated projects, like the Open Congress which we organized with Tate and was the impetus for our committment to work together. We started the ball rolling at our Annual Picnic on the 26th June 2008 in St Jame's Park London. Seven people met, bringing food, drink and three Big Ideas each. We plucked each other's suggestions out of a blue fedora (one Big Idea arrived by text message) and discussed their connections, alternatives, feasibility, and possible figurations. Notably, two broad categories of activity emerged:

Short-term focused events

Longer-term projects

We reconvened on the 10th July at 7pm in the foyer cafe of the Royal Festival Hall, London to decide how to further develop the big ideas. We developed The Enthusiasm index, a means of voting and gauging the level of commitment among Critical Practitioners to see an idea through to completion, to actually make it happen - Enthusiasm coupled with responsibility.

Several of the Big Ideas, notably proposed project on Sustainability, a Market of Organization, an Open Source Festival and the Biography of Collaboration all slowly morphed into the idea of A Market of......

28th October meeting

We are joined by Kuba Szreder, a curator from Warsaw with an interest in Public Space ....

Kuba describes to us the inflatable structure he has used for a conference in Warsaw and shows us some images. It's a semi-transparent bubble, very easy to install that creates a kind of separate but but visible private space, in public space. In Kuba's words
It puts the event in a performative relation with the space in which it happens.

We are considering how this structure might fit with the Big Ideas project A Market of ... and the theme that is emerging: an exploration of the constructs behind notions of public sphere/space. There is an obvious correspondence between these concerns and our ongoing enquiry into knowledge and the internet as public spaces.

In Poland, the idea of 'bourgeois public space' after Habermas, informs much of the discourse on public space, but only in theory. Because the cultural context and specific history of many Eastern European countries, which were urbanized much later then Western societies (Poland, till 2nd World War, was in 80% agrarian country) still determines how people are producing space(s) and is influencing urban experience.

We decide the notion of 'bourgeois public space', does not really provide good insight into these practices. We explored otherr possible formats in which public space in constructed, talked about arabic casbah - bazzar, ramblers fights to get a right for walking in countryside in UK, Cinzia described the ways of using the public space in Italy.

We begin to crystalize the idea of organising a Market-format-event to address these issues, and that an Eastern / Western european contrast copuld be rewarding. Perhaps it could be part of the Polish Season in UK which will run from May 2009 to May 2010. We might approach The Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the organising entity,

LOCATION: We imagine an event in the Chelsea Parade Ground, with a variety of structures designed and built in collaboration with chosen architects, designers, students, participants in he Market ...

We want to take into account the history of building (first prison, then military hospital, now art school ...), the spacial relation with Tate Britain, ideas of panopticon, ideas of 'right of way', all in relation to notions of public sphere.

The Market will be a 'notional grid' made of zones for social encounters.

ACTIONS
We will pay attention to the relations and forms of assembly created by the spaces and structures.
We will approach the The Adam Mickiewicz Institute, proposing an event for May 2010 as part of the Polish Season.
We will assemble a list of architects, designers and organizations we want to involve.

21st January 2009

Our first meeting with Aneta Prasal- Wisniewska from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute Aneta is the curator of the Polska Year! for 2009/10 which comprises over 200 projects to introduce the most interesting achievements of Polish culture and artists to the British public. We review the project so far, and our desire to collapse the form of the conference into its content.

Aneta is a very positive, and we discussed some possibilities, specifically that we go on some research visits to Poland.

We start to discuss the private sponsorship of public goods, of differing structures - agora, bazzar, auditorium, and how the possible architectural structure could be made, and unmade over the period over the event. And differing modes of engagement - lectures, bar-camps, workshops, hackmeets, seminas, informal clusters, Maybe it should be up for a couple of weeks, we talk of 'renting out a 'plot' to private interests, retail spaces, payment for toilets, etc. Taking private money and supporting a public - good seems a key idea.

We start to look for public funding, we begin applications and look at the Arts Council Criteria. and look for private sponsorship. Google seem perfect

We start to discuss who we would like to work with; architects, designers, artists, politicians, and organizations. We decide to aggregate these people on our wiki

ACTIONS
Possible (research) trip to Poland - What are the objectives of this trip?

1.To understand some of the issues of public space/public realm in Poland

2.To meet people Kuba has suggested my be involved in the project

Cinzia offered an interesting gloss on the project: It's about the relationships between physical structures and sociopolitical participants

research trip to Poland 10th-15th May 2009

Five of us went on a brilliantly organized research trip to Warsaw and Poznan, Kuba Szreder did the organization, and we were generously supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute

Sunday 10th May
We arrive in the evening and stay at the Novotel, with stunning views of the Place of Culture

Monday 11th May

morning
We walked the 'new' urban developments, the new living / working / leisure spaces of the gated communities in Nowy Wilanow and Marina Mokotow - as examples of the neoliberal constitution of public space with Dr Maciej Gdula, sociologist from Krytyka Polityczna.

afternoon
We meet curator Joanna Warsza who describes her projects in the Stadion, visit a Pagoda, stroll through the remnants of the Jarmark Europa - the biggest bazaar in Warsaw, which skirts the Stadion/sports stadium (being renovated for euro 2012) and have the best Vietnamese pho we have ever eaten. Then we walk in the Praga district - traditionally a working class area, a scarred and derelict district of Warsaw now going through gentrification. And in the evening supper in Kuba's home, where we met Joanna Rajkowska, Agnieszka Kurant, Jakub Szczsny, Bogna Swiatkowska and many others.........!

Tuesday 12th May

We stroll along Nowy Swiat to the old town - Stare Miasto, and discuss the film-set eariness of the painstaking reconstruction.
Then meet Kuba at the Palm Tree rondo of Al. Jerozolimskie, walk to Bogna Swiatkowska's shop/gallery/publishing house/design bureau/library/um..., and then on to meet Folke Kobberling at the Centre of Contemporary Art at Ujazdowskie Castle. Taxi to Pulawska to meet with Dr Ewa Majewska - feminist and social philosopher - to wander down Dolna Street to experience the ways in which public space is controlled, and the means of excluding and disciplining the Other (particularly woman, migrants etc.). We skip the chance of hearing Slavo Zizek lecture at Warsaw University, for dinner and discussion in a magnificent unreconstructed 70's restaurant - complete with toilet lady, basketry ceiling and perfunctory ;-) service. Food was good though!

Wednesday 13th May

A long, stunning and emotional walking tour in former Warsaw ghetto with Ela Janicka - literature critic and theoretician of culture with focus on Polish/Jewish relations, the constitution of Warsaw public space connected with rejecting the memory of Jewish presence in Poland. At the end of the tour, at the Jewish Ghetto Monument we meet Adam Ostolski from Krytyka Polityczna, who gave a brilliant talk on the 'renovation' of collective memory as public space. Exhausted, we still managed to eat Lebanese food, listen to a presentation from Jakub Szczsny from Centrala, then Natalia Romik (working in architecture office Nizio Design) on the renovation of former synagogue in Chmielnik, and have a lively discussion.

Thursday 14th May

morning
We caught the train from Warsaw Centralna to Poznan, dropped our bags at the hotel and headed out to the Botanical Gardens to sit in on a symposium on Art - Cultural Capital and the Polish City. We were late for the first afternoon session, so we sat in the shade of a tree and had a lively discussion about public services - particularly what might be the minimum provision. We thought about fresh water, and what to do with human waste. How to make the provision of these resources, which we tend to take for granted, palpable in Parade?
afternoon & evening
We join the symposium and listened to some papers (translated simultaneously by Ewelina) on Museums and small cities and photographs of re-purposed synagogues. There was a bus tour into Poznan with live art events at various public venues, then an exhibition opening in a disused publishing house, and then we all had dinner in a famous meat and dumpling restaurant.

Friday 15th May

morning
We skip the symposium to wander in the beautiful market square of Poznan. We also visit the award-winning Stary Bower Shopping Centre. According to Poznan in your pocket this art, leisure and shopping extravaganza was originally home to the Huggera Brewery. In 1918, the factory produced 72,000 hectaliters of beer. It remained open through the German occupation, closing temporarily in 1944 to serve as a bunker. The factory finally stopped brewing beer in 1980 but continued bottling water until 1998, when it was purchase by Fortis group for US$ 66 million. Today this 100000m2 shoppers paradise draws around 40,000 people daily. Chic cafes, luxurious boutiques and comparable art: an impressive plan combines new and old build and earned Stary Bower recognition as the world's best shopping centre in the 'new centre medium' category. And the place is clean, spotless. We watched Polish cleaners polish various surfaces. (Michaela was convinced they were performers--a Beecroft, perhaps.) One even approached us, bent down and picked up a tiny bit of dirt off the floor by my feet. Perhaps it came from the gorgeous green park next door? North American shopping centres are almost always surrounded by parks of a different kind: car parks. It was lovely to sit on the grass next to Stary and brainstorm the roof structure for Parade.

We headed back to Hotel Rzymski, grabbed our bags and headed to the airport.

Publicamp 5th July 2009

When: Sunday 5th July, 2-5pm
Where: Kennington Park

To refine and generate some of the intellectual content, and perhaps some of the participants for Parade, we convened a PubliCamp in Kennington Park – a former common, scene of a huge public Chartist gathering, enclosed (with Royal sponsorship), and now a ‘public’ park.

We intend to explore different conceptions of publicness - historical, cultural, political, social, architectural and digital. We aim to develop a shared ethic towards the notion of public goods, and will not be deterred by the disagreeable, contentious, messy, inefficient, live, improvisatory and provisional nature of Being in Public. Public, common or shared resources are like muscles: they become stronger with exercise.

PubliCamp will use a barcamp structure, something we have experimented with before.

BarCamps are an international network of user generated unconferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants.

They work like this: presentations (which might aggregate into themed sessions) are proposed on-the-day by attendees. We then try and build themed 'sessions' or groups of related presentations using white/flip boards. All attendees are encouraged to present and share their expertise. We proposed 10 minute presentations, with 10 minutes for questions/discussion. Everyone is encouraged to share information (there is a scribe working live) and experiences of the event, both live and after the fact, via blogging, photo sharing, twitter, etc.

Through Publicamp we identified various themes of interest that aim to carry forward in Parade.

1. Public Utilities what infrastructures are necessary to constitute a public: - what resources / utilities / institutions / technologies / knowledges / etc, are necessary. Conditions of possibility...to constitute a public. - eg. the difference between 'public' and 'community'. The limits of 'being in public'.
2. Public address modes of addressing / speaking / communicating / demanding. HOW people act / speak constitutes WHAT the public is. That results in various typologies of public speech and typologies of publics. For example, making a final statement before being hanged versus the Chartist petition as a political speech act. How might making a speech at Speaker's Corner be different from making a speech in Kennington Park?
3. Archeologies of the Public how The Public constitutes itself in various cultural, discursive and historical contexts. For example in relation to the history of Parade Ground (prison, training hospital barracks, museum, academy) and other localities - let's invite speakers with knowledge/experience/links with specific PUBLIC spaces. And Ubuntu other non-Westerns notions of publicness
4. Glocalization
5. Public Ownership what do we mean by calling resources / goods / domains / services / knowledge public – does it mean that they are state-owned, publically-managed, or commonly accessible? Rights and responsibilities.
6. The Public Body bodies in public and the socialization of space: - how Public space caters to some bodies and not others. What kind of subjects/bodies/genders/races and ablilities are authorized to enact the Public, and how? What kind of groups are included / excluded from the Public (closely linked to issues of visibility and invisibility - like the Vietnamese community in Warsaw, and the invisibility of disable bodies in archives).
7. Being in Public Performing or enacting the Public, or - If we don't use it, we'll lose it. – public domain / space / services/ knowledge/consciousness, etc is only ever performed. It is rather a process then a 'being' The public is a messy, unknown, conflictual and unpredictable mode of 'being in common'
8. Sustainability - Environmental conditions and how they shape public space, such as Heathrow's flight paths, police sirens, rain and wind
9. Expectations of how public space should be used; disruptions of these expectations - public space as unknown
10. The relationship between Public and Private. Does participation make public? Where does the individual fit? How is ONE responsible for activating different modalities of being in public? Public relations and private relationships.
11. The emotions and affects of being in public - optimism / enjoyment / frustration

Public Body Barcamp 17th October 2009

What; Public Body Barcamp
When; 17th October
Where; Nowy Wspanialy Świat (former Nowy Świat cafe), ul. Nowy Świat 63 Warsaw

Jointly facilitated by Critical Practice and the Free Slow University of Warsaw, the Public Body BarCamp is an encounter open to anyone concerned with notions of being-in-public, and who wishes to explore ideas about the public body. We proposed the themes of ;

1. Bodies in public and the socialization of space: - how public space caters to some bodies and not others.
2. What kind of subjects/bodies/genders/races and ablilities are authorized to enact the public. And how?
3. What kind of groups are included / excluded from the Public - like the Vietnamese community in Warsaw, and the (general) invisibility of disability.
4. What infrastructures - utilities / institutions / technologies / knowledges - are necessary to facilitate a public body

Open Lecture Series

Critical Practice collaborated with the TrAIN research centre on a series of presentations, where we could invite some of the artists, architects and curators we were working with to share their experiences, visit the site and blah, blah, blah

Open Lecture Series: 1

Date: Wednesday 02 December 2009
Location: Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design, 16 John Islip Street, SW1P 4JU

Joanna Warsza will discuss her curated series of live art projects The Finissage of Stadium X and the related reader Stadium X — A Place That Never Was. Both projects were inspired by the heterotopic logic of Warsaw’s 10th-Anniversary Stadium, and its long-standing (non-) presence in the middle of the city. Built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-devastated capital, in the early 1990s the stadium fell into ruin, being ‘revived’ by Vietnamese and Russian traders. Since then the Stadium and the open-air market surrounding it have become an Asian town, a primeval garden, a realm of discount shopping, a storehouse of biographies and urban legends, a spontaneous piece of Land-Art, or a work camp for archaeologists and botanists.

Open Lecture Series: 2

Date:' Monday January 25, 2010
Location: Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design
16 John Islip Street
SW1P 4JU

Aleksandra Wasilkowska is a Polish architect with a particular interest in self-organizing structures. She will be presenting a number of her studio’s recent projects, and will introduce her collaborator Michał Piasecki, a specialist in generative procedures. Aleksandra will be collaborating on the Parade Public Modes of Assembly, and forms of Address.

Open Lecture Series: 3

Date: Wednesday 10 February
Location: Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design
16 John Islip Street
SW1P 4JU
Joanna Rajkowska (born in Bydgoszcz, Poland) is an author of objects, films, installations, ephemeral actions, as well as interventions in public space. Her works reflect changes in the reception and expectations towards art and its social functions, referring to the complexity of identity problems affecting Eastern European countries following their economic and political transformation of the 1990s.

Rajkowska's most widely discussed works: Pozdrowienia z Alej jerozolimskich/ Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue (2002-2009) and Dotleniacz/ Oxygenator (2006-2007) functioned as contemporary ‘social sculptures,' activating layers of meanings (both historical and ideological), provoking conflicts, serving as specific platforms interwoven into the urban tissue of Warsaw, being used for debates, arguments and manifestations. These works might also be considered as merely pretexts for discussion about the issues of land control and potential forms in which collective memory might be manifested as public monuments. As Joanna Rajkowska's works materialise through ‘urban legends,' press-cuttings, gossips and media debates, their form is always ‘unfinished,' so there is the possibility they will evolve and mutate, even against the artist's initial intentions.

Parade

news

The Circular Artefact Working Group
When: tbc. September at 2pm
Location: Research Office, Chelsea College of Art and Design
To discuss the moving Image aspect of the project

The Rectangular Artefact Working Group When: tbc. September at 4-6pm
Location: Research Office, Chelsea College of Art and Design
To discuss taking the publication

Metod has instituted File Naming Guidelines for ease of location and assembly of the digital materials. This will make a massive difference in precision and fewer mistakes through the postproduction.

old news

The Circular Artefact Working Group
When: Thursday 8th July at 2pm
Location: Research Office, Chelsea College of Art and Design
To discuss the moving Image aspect of the project

The Rectangular Artefact Working Group When: Thursday 15th July at 4-6pm
Location: Research Office, Chelsea College of Art and Design
To discuss taking the publication
read the minutes of the June meeting

Take a look at BarCamp films from the Satellite Group

Remember the PARADE Launch Evening the Barcamps, or the