Transforming Spaces

Forced entertainment did a project in 1995 called Nights in this City. It was a guided tour on a bus through Sheffield. The performers guided the tour but “avoided facts in search of a different truth.” (Tim Etchells, Certain fragments – Eight Fragments on Theatre and the City) They told imaginary stories which put the city into a different light. A certain place can have one official name, history and function, but any individual could look at it completely differently. It may hold a particular memory or have a feeling attached to it. One can take a space (as we did with the library) and over its actual map, draw another “map” – one of emotions, thoughts, memories and associations. In Certain fragments – Eight Fragments on Theatre and the City Tim Etchells says: “Did I tell you that up on West Street someone has written on a burned-out building GET WELL SOON? Did I tell you that in some parts of the city the phones in the call boxes ring to empty streets at regular hours of the day and night? Are these events connected? Are there persons here, working in concert? In the city as in all the best performance, I`m left joining dots, making my own connections, reasons, speculation.” This paints a picture of the city as a place of lots of little wonders and of people who create them. It is up to each person to find connections between them and to give meaning to them. Krzysztof Wodiczko said about the city: “What are our cities? Are they environments that are trying to say something to us? Are they environments in which we communicate with each other? Or are they perhaps the environments of things that we don’t see, of silences, of the voices which we don’t, or would rather not, hear. The places of all of those back alleys where perhaps the real public space is, where the experiences of which we should be speaking, where voices that we should be listening to, are hidden in the shadows of monuments and memorials.” (quote from the PBS art21 website: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/krzysztof-wodiczko) Krzysztof Wodiczko takes buildings and monuments and projects images and videos unto them. The images he uses comment on or criticize political issues. The architectural structures he chooses for the projections can make the images seem very controversial. Concerning war memorials Wodiczko said: “We still have to see those symbolic structures, war memorials, in relation to contemporary situations.” (https://www.nfb.ca/film/krzysztof_wodiczko_projections) In 1988 he projected images of homeless people on the war memorial in Boston. The average person passing by a war memorial might take a moment to remember the victims of that war. However, at that very moment there are similarly tragic things happening that people don`t regularly think about or avoid to think about. Wodiczko`s projections transform spaces people frequent every day into meaning something different, into bearing a message. People are led to think and talk about the issues presented and “to open up and speak about what’s unspeakable” (http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/krzysztof-wodiczko).