Founded and created by Dr Eve Olney and artist Kate O Shea, Spare Room is a two week art exhibition that inhabits a disused building in Cork City Centre. It’s theme is framed within the rationale of critiquing institutional complicity within different forms of precarious living conditions. The five arts projects produced for this exhibition strive to move art social practice beyond ‘rehearsals’ of the social into concrete outcomes. It situates art practice firmly within the social through highly innovative collaborative art processes and presents art-led feasible alternatives to collectively organising and inhabiting the everyday.
Middle Space. The idea is to create a space that represents some of the fundamental concepts of the commons; inherent flexibility, ideas around collective making, creating collective identity, access, trust, solidarity, struggle and sense of place. We want it to be playful and conductive to new forms of social imaginaries.
As a place that integrates all the other spaces, I proposed an installation for this area as a way to connect sites and systems in order to critique and understand them. I was interested in generating parallels of scale and context through a series of modern multi-functional minimalist maquettes. Enlarging and distorting their elements as a way to move beyond individual representation so alternative ideas and perspectives can co exist.
Most of the parts comprising the installation are not fixed together but rather placed, supporting, aligned elements, that if necessary can be reconfigured for re-examination or repurpose. Considering that the construction of space is framed by (and frames) systems of governance, institutional models, living, schooling etc, this proposed contribution is intended to examine how spatiality, objects and concepts can prompt spatial, civic and social interest.