Our local environments are too easily subject to oversight and under-evaluation. It is natural to become desensitized to our immediate surroundings once we have broadly assessed and established a sufficient understanding of them to get on with things. Parallel to our physical habitat we can map our environment in terms of shared social significance, and choose to navigate the invisible space holding the stories, identities and memories of the people who use it.
The UK is saturated with regeneration schemes. Towns and Cities across the country are undergoing lavish programs of re-invention to better position themselves in the post-industrial landscape, but in doing so often ignore the strengths and ideas already present in the social communities there renovating. Unfortunately the process of municipal redevelopment rarely involves opportunities for its inhabitants’ experience of the place, the ‘invisible environment’ to inform its progression.
Based on the assertion that in order to change things we must first attain a decent understanding of them, For the Public by the Public is an ongoing project seeking to reflect the relationships between people and place within communal spaces. By talking to members of a community, ideas, thoughts, stories and moments from there life can emerge and be gathered to reinterpret and re-map the area based on social memory.
The community of Bedminster once thrived as the retail centre of Bristol, until in 1980, Broadmead Shopping Centre sent Bristollians flocking to the city centre for their goods.
Since then Bedminster’s Identity as a vibrant are of trade has faded, and with the prospect of Broadmead’s further five hundred million pound redevelopment in 2008, may soon be forgotten entirely. Fortunately the history of Bedminster’s trade is still traceable today in its colourful local shop culture.
The project sought to provide a catalyst for bringing people together to share experiences. By sourcing local signwriters, the visual language familiar and significant to the community was appropriated to reflect its own memories back to its wider self by as relevant means as possible, the language of the shop.
The responses were collated into a book as a visual and textual accompany to the exhibition For the Public by the Public which took place in a discarded shop for two weeks in December 2007 on Coronation Road in Bedminster. The exhibition gives voice to a collection of memories offered by the community of Bedminster, sharing with the public the history of its ‘invisible environment’.
_______________Memories
Shop owners of Bedminster were asked to write a message about there experiences of the local area. The messages were then exchanged between shops and placed inside the shop windows for passers to see.
_____________Sign Writers
Local sign writers, were asked to recreate these messages into shop signs, using the language of the shop to appropriately reflect there memories. The Signs were then placed on the discarded shops from which they came from.
_______________Exhibition
The exhibition ‘For the Public by the Public’ took place in the Conway and young ‘Open’ gallery (a previously discarded shop) for two weeks in December 2007 on Coronation Road in Bedminster. The exhibition gives voice to a collection of memories offered by the community of Bedminster, sharing with the public the history of its ‘invisible environment’.
___________For the public, by the public.
Exhibition accompaniment
Digital print / Silkscreen solid white
Printed on ‘Shop’ Pink Maya / Claire Fontaine Pollen
120 Page
The book is a visual and textual accompany to the exhibition For the Public by the Public which took place in a discarded shop for two weeks in December 2007 on Coronation Road in Bedminster.
Photographs of the book will be uploaded soon.