FORTHCOMING: Application for Residency at the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home Accepted!

The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home is funded by Lena Simic and Gary Anderson of twoaddthree on 10% of their annual wage. The remit for The Institute extends to homemade/DIY aesthetics, family matters, home, private/public). In their words:

"The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home is a space for dissenting the Capitalism of Culture. We are unhappy about how the culture is produced, consumed and digested here/now – Liverpool08, European Capital of Culture. We are interested in creating an alternative to the mainstream production and consumption of art and culture" - Email to Simon Bowes 7th Feb 2008.

I submitted the following Application in early February. I want to use The Institute as a base from which to explore the vanishing traces of my family's ties to the city of Liverpool and surrounds, and to develop a model of discrete works disseminated through performance lecture.

Application to the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, for Research and Development Period and subsequent Performance Lecture (Untitled) (expected timescale, March – April 2008)

Foreword: From the outset, note that this project is neither proposed not undertaken specifically manufacture or critically reflect upon dissent, although its aims, intentions, methodologies may contribute perspectives on the home (as place, journey, or place-as-journey) as a counterpoint to commercialization of Culture as an industry. My foremost aim will be to explore “home” in terms of spatial practices, outside of architectures, as I am seeking to perform a revaluation of the concept of home in my own practice, and to offer points of reference to the practical/theoretical remit of The Institute.

Proposal: 1. Born here, I don’t know the city. And we are disappearing, slowly. So: why “here” (why “home”)? The phrase recurs: “A family of absences”, and very little to trace them out. My granddad died recently, reminding us how little we will know, now, of our lineages and histories. Goodnight. God Bless. 2. To come here, now, is to arrive in a changing city. It is also, we might argue, to become the recipient, (perhaps not the beneficiary) of privately funded culture (you get of at Lime St., someone hands you a flyer for an event. You rush past, on your way to wherever, say “no thanks”). 3. I feel drawn-in, I need to come (back) here (but how?). There are lots and lots of things to see, lots and lots of things to do. I could go and visit Ben Johnson’s 170,000 hectare painting The Liverpool City Scape. Or I could embark, with other tourists, on the Magical History Tour (each of these implies a particular model of spatial practice relying, in the first instance, on an artist’s visual re-interpretation of the city or, I the second, interpretations of its history. Of course, neither experience is likely to bring me any closer to what I am seeking – home). 4. In respectful opposition, I propose for myself an different model of tourism, a personal and largely anonymous performance in response to the vanishing of our histories. 5. Acknowledging the wisdom of the saying Svakog gosta tri dana dosta! (Each guest is enough after three days), I propose to visit Liverpool for three days, using the residency as a base. From there I will plot a series of routes according to the barest of biographical about my family: street names, addresses of the back of photographs, places featured in the old stories, before I tour the City and surrounds. 6. Navigating according to an inherited, but rather outdated, social geography, the journeys will permit often tenuous or even fictional and misremembered correlations to dictate my course, in the full hope and anticipation of getting lost. The journeys will research (i.e., turn, re-turn, search-again) the impossibility of belonging to homes that were never mine. My aim will be to translate a sense of loss and lost-ness into a sense of reverie, hope, and optimism, as I record my journey, not only as a record of people and things past, but as a testimony to homes still occupied, journeys still made, lives still lived. 7. (Because All at Once Am I Several Stories) I will keep a notebook of events in relation to site, place, location and journey. 8. This research period will inform the development of a lecture, delivered one week later at The Institute, to an invited audience (Liverpool-based practitioners, Liverpool Hope Staff, Students?), before opening up the themes of home, familiar relations to general dialogue. 9. Budget: TRAVEL 2 x10.50 New Mills Central to Liverpool Lime St = £21.00, Buses round Liverpool: £7.50 / R&D (Liverpool) £5.22 x 8 = 41.60 x 3= £125 / WRITING / RESEARCH / LECTURE £5.22 x 8 = £41.60 TOTAL: £195.10.