Caroline Woolard
making work and doing researchArchive for January, 2008
La Fura dels Baus
They use infrastructure and industrial machinery so well! see the set of images here
La Fura dels Baus are a Catalan radical theatre group from Barcelona, 30 years of experimenting behind them. These images are from their latest show, Naumachia III, premiered on Spiller’s Quay, in Newcastle, in July 2007.
Naumachia is a huge, outdoor event. The hour long performance appeared from every where – from the boat ( the Naumon ) , from huge cranes suspending live singers and acrobats over the quay, the boat and the audience at dizzying height. Some 90 performers contributed to this amazing performance, many whom are local trained climbers, at heights of over 30 metres from the ground in a matrix of ropes, chains and equipment creating a human mesh of movement – at the same time that an enormous illuminated ball lights up with projected images of people, the earth, crawling with figures appearing through holes in the fabric surface, and manipulated by two 20 metre tall puppet like robotic figures made from fibre glass and metal struts, hanging from massive crane.
The boat Naumon is 70 metres long, painted orange, a retired icebreaker. This is the 20th show performed from this ship on a journey taking La Fura dels Baus over 10,000 nautical miles. Next stop Russia.
Here is their web site – www.lafura.com
Das Park Hotel by Austrian Andreas Strauss
rethinking utilities: large concrete drain pipes as a hotel… reserve a room
Enough Room for Space show about reimagined public space
Martin Hendrijks show called Enough Room for Space about
“Displacement of residents, whether they are gentrifying artists priced out of Soho or the poor and unemployed excluded from New York altogether, is no random by-product of gentrification but its structural condition. Decay, disinvestment, abandonment . . .prepare the way for profitable reinvestment . . . Like all the social relations that art supposedly transcends, housing is one of the historical circumstances of its existence”. Rosalyn Deutsche, “Alternative Space”
“And howsoever oppositional we architects may be, as long as we fail to challenge basic elements of society, such as the concept of private property, nothing will improve. This is a great paradox for me”. Achim Felz, “IKAS: An Experiment in Extra-Parliamentary Architectural Opposition”
