The Doxa

Public art and public participation have been evolving a lot in the last forty years. But how do you create an art plan that can respond to changing ground conditions? Because plans are implemented over a scale of decades they need to be both specific and adaptable–and stay relevant even as the neighborhoods they envision change unexpectedly. We got the chance to team up with Cliff Garten Studio, Todd Bressi and Via Partnership to test out a new approach to creating a public art plan for the cities of Minneapolis and St Paul, which will soon be connected by a new light rail line. The art plan will reach out beyond the Central Corridor light rail, to shape the surrounding neighborhoods which will be influenced by the new infrastructure. According to the project client, Public Art Saint Paul:

The Metropolitan Council’s Central Corridor LRT project has engaged visual artists to create public art at the Project’s 18 new stations and platforms. This Art Plan seeks to go beyond the LRT public art program in scope, range of artistic media, and time frame. The Art Plan will articulate a vision for art in multiple media and move beyond the stations and platforms to consider the entire public realm: public buildings, the streetscape, landmarks, pathways, parks and open spaces, and water quality infrastructure. It will engage neighborhoods, educational institutions, and economic and cultural centers and envision opportunities for public art in future private sector transit oriented developments.

The project represents an opportunity for a new approach: using artwork itself as a means to engage the public and give shape to the plan. As a part of the process, Rebar envisions public events in the spirit of Park(ing) Day that engage community members around the physical territory of the new Central Corridor to test ideas, learn about the site, and prototype new ways of inhabiting space as a means of gathering first-hand data that can inform the art plan.

After the field was whittled down to three contenders last month, we got word that our team was selected to create the plan. We’re excited to bring to bear several emerging themes of our practice to bear on this new project.

Rebar recently returned from a week in Copenhagen, Denmark to participate in ” Contemporary, Fun, and Temporary” a conference organised by landscape architect Bettina Lamm, University of Copenhagen department of Forest & Landscape in collaboration with curator Charlotte Bagger Brandt, Råderum – office of contemporary art.

Conference participants included an impressive list of Denmark’s architects, planners, developers, artists and urbanists. Rebar presented on the topic of user generated urbanism and discussed the evolution of our practice from guerilla interventions like Park(ing) Day to our ongoing collaboration with the City of San Francisco’s Pavement to Parks program.

We were thrilled to present along with Christof Mayer from Raumlabor, Berlin’s version of Rebar on steroids. Christoff described a few of the incredible and diverse project he and his group have been involved in since 1999.

Conference organizer’s Bettina and Charlotte have been collaborating over the course of the last year, and organizing a series of Breakfast Salons at various site’s throughout the city. We were lucky to participate in one of the salon’s held atop a former paint factory being converted into cultural spaces.  We met a number of incredible artists and cultural producers including Christian Fumz of Givrum. Givrum is an organization working for the deployment of empty buildings for cultural and social purposes. They offer free guidance to social and cultural entrepreneurs wishing to start up a culture platforms.

Rebar’s John Bela spent the week exploring the city, meeting an incredible group of artists, activists, and designers and generally gushing over the extensive bicycle culture and the separated bike lane network throughout the city.

grade separated bike lanes form an extensive network throughout the city

Copenhagen is full of incredible street art.

Temporary (?) playgrounds at the Carlsberg Brewery site

During the conference Rebar hosted a hands on workshop entitled “Unfound Niche, Unmet Need”. We started by collectively drawing and brainstorming concepts for Parking Day intervetions, and then discussed the opportunities to transform some of Copenhagen’s many niche spaces in ways that could fulfull unmet social needs.

Rebar hopes to be invited back to Copenhagen in the Spring of 2012 to participate in a project in Koge, A small port city to the south of Copenhagen undergoing a transformation of its industrial waterfront. Bettina and Charlotte hope to bring a group of both local and international artists and urbanists to develop a set of projects, exhibitions, and spaces that activate the future development site, test ideas embedded in the redevelopment proposals, and explore the role of art as an engine for urban regeneration.

The potential project site in Koge

Just checked out the website and a friend’s photos from Figment in New York City (Governor’s Island). Looks juicy, especially this. Wish we had a Rebar jet.

Living Pavilion by Ann Ha and Behrang Behin via Flickr | Benchun.

We just got our author’s copy of Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla urbanism and the remaking of contemporary cities, Jeff Hou ed. Rebar comments on public space practice in chapter 4, y’all. Apparently Amazon.com already has 4 used copies, which means…I don’t know….at least someone already bought one! Get yours now!

We are putting a CA native wildflower meadow downtown. The idea is to re-purpose a fallow lot into a beautiful living habitat for humming birds, butterflies and other pollinators.

If you are interested in helping out while learning more about gardening, irrigation and how to attract pollinators, then come on out Thursday, April ^15th anytime between 10am-5pm.

Some of what we will be doing includes:

• Finishing up the mounting 4’ pollinator plywood silhouettes (giant butterflies, hummingbirds, beetles etc.) on posts above the garden.

• Creating more planting circles filled with sheet mulch, compost and soil.

• Installing more drip irrigation.

• Seeding more CA native wildflowers.

The location:

Large lot on Harrison between 1^st and Essex streets.

Time and Date:

Thursday April 1^5th 10 am-4:30pm

We promise to once again make this fun.

RSVP to Gregory if you think you can make it,..even if just for an hour or so.

And as always, feel free to call or email with any questions you may have:

Gregorykellett@gmail.com 415.260.242

Lansing Street pollinator

From our partner Gregory, who’s leading the planting of a pollinator garden at Rebar’s interim use project at 45 Lansing in downtown San Francisco:

Rebar and the Pollinator Partnership are putting a CA native wildflower meadow downtown. The idea is to repurpose a fallow lot into a beautiful living habitat for humming birds, butterflies and other pollinators.

If you are interested in helping out while learning more about gardening, irrigation and how to attract pollinators, then come on out Sat. April 3rd.

Some of what we will be doing includes:

• Mounting 4’ pollinator plywood silhouettes (giant butterflies, hummingbirds, beetles etc.) on posts above the garden.
• Creating planting circles filled with sheet mulch, compost and soil.
• Installing drip irrigation.
• Seeding CA native wildflowers.

The location: Large lot on Harrison between 1st and Essex streets.

Time and Date: Sat April 3rd 10 am-4:30pm

We promise to make this fun.

RSVP if you think you can make it,..even if just for an hour or so.

-Gregory

And feel free to call or email with any questions you may have

Gregorykellett [at] gmail [dot com] 415.260.2428

Aerial view of plan

Our friends and collaborators at Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge are leading a relief effort for the small (and easily overlooked) Juan Fernandez Islands, off the coast of Chile. This chain of islands, where Oikonos conducts an ongoing habitat restoration project, was recently devastated by the tsunami that followed the utterly enormous Chile earthquake.

Yes, despite the prevailing presentation of events, there was a tsunami.

Isla Alejandro Selkirk, one of the Juan Fernandez chain

Robinson Crusoe Island experienced particularly intense and deadly devastation. A group of journalism students from Chile and the U.S., who visited that remote island, have produced a video that gives a window into the culture of the island and the destruction visited by the recent tsunami. You can watch the video below.

Oikonos has set up a relief fund for the Juan Fernandez Islands.You can donate by clicking here.

100% of donations go directly to on the ground island relief efforts.

Tsunami Relief for Robinson Crusoe Island from Más a Tierra on Vimeo.

And here is the post from the journalists:

“In the spring of 2006, as a combined group of American and Chilean journalism students, we traveled together to Robinson Crusoe Island, four hundred miles off the coast of Santiago, Chile, to document life on this small and isolated island.

In the ten days we spent recording and photographing the people of the island, each and every one of us was struck by their unique way of life and the resolve with which they carve out their existence in such a remote place, rich with history but severely lacking in resources that we often take for granted.

And so it was with great sorrow and shock – in the days following the 8.8-magnitude earthquake that shook the Chilean mainland in February 2010 – that we began to hear news trickle in about Robinson Crusoe Island.

According to reports, the island’s emergency warning system failed, and a giant tsunami took the residents by surprise, covering nearly two miles of the island and reaching 300 meters up from the natural coastline. When the ocean retreated, it took with it nearly all of San Juan Bautista, the coastal settlement that the island’s 650 residents call home.

What few community resources that served the people of Robinson Crusoe Island before the tsunami hit are now completely wiped away: the school, community center, fishing boats, supply stores… and many, many homes.

As you can tell from the stories and lives highlighted on this site, the fragile yet resilient community of Robinson Crusoe Island is a special place in this world, and its people need our help in rebuilding their lives. Anything you can give to help these families would be a tremendous help. Oikonos, a 501 c 3 non-profit, has set up a donation fund to directly support the people of Robinson Crusoe Island. All of the money they receive will go specifically to the people of the island, to rebuild their homes, their school and their livelihoods.

Please take a moment to do what you can, and explore this site to learn about the unique and wonderful lives you are helping to rebuild.

We thank you for your open hearts”

Relief Efforts

1. Donate to the cause. Please give what you can. Go straight to oikonos.org/donate.htm and send some tax deductible dollars. 100% of your donation goes to the island.

2. Spread the word. Email your friends, colleagues and family members. Twitter and Facebook the story. Many of you work at major news organizations. Use your connections to get this written about, blogged about and talked about. A little effort goes a long way.

Right as the dust began to settle in our newly acquired studio space and workshop, we we’re informed by our landlord that a new large tenant was seeking to occupy the rest of the space in our building. In fact, they needed so much room that they desired to engulf our new studio into their production and distribution operation.

This led to some hard feelings among the ‘Bars seeing as this was our first home, having spent the previous five years meeting and hanging out in local bars and relying on the generosity of a certain fantastic local community gallery.

After a month or so of negotiations we came up with the idea of keeping our current mezzanine loft area with all its irreplaceable character of exposed wooden beams and brick, and expanding our workshop space into the adjacent studio.

So while our new neighbor tenant has engulfed the previous rebar shopspace, we are in the process of engulfing the adjacent tatoo parlor and shop space into a new, labyrinthine collection of shops, storefronts, mezzanines and lofts that will soon make up the Rebar Studio.

Having spent so much time thinking about how outdoor public space is a physical manifestation of social codes, and devoting our practice to exploring the niches, loopholes and voids in the public realm, its enlightening to learn through the visceral experince of building remodeling how plastic the built environment is.

How walls and ceilings can shift and move according to molten sets of values, economies, and relationships.

We look forward to returning from Paris to our new space, or collection of spaces, that will seemingly be quite appropriate for the diverse and dynamic practice that the new Rebar studio is growing to support.

via Atlanta Travel Journal: John W. English. http://www.ajc.com/travel/content/travel/southeast/ga_stories/2009/03/01/onetank_0301tr2.html

The yellow school bus takes a long, long ride before it finally quits. Besides occasionally getting remixed into a bus stop in Atlanta, GA as a part of an arts program, many old yellow buses continue their useful life outside the United States. In Congo, they have become the staple vehicle of public transportation in Kinshasa, first arriving in the early 1980s.

Boxy buses that once carted American children now haul Congo’s impoverished people, young and old — and their loads of preserved fish, powdered milk, beans, onions and cassava. Charging breakneck around the capital, the yellow buses rattle fiercely, as they hurtle through the potholes peppering Kinshasa’s roads. The blinking tail lights that had protected many a child are now either missing or broken.

While many castoff products from rich Western countries find new use in Africa, the ripped T-shirts, faintly treaded shoes and old computers haven’t had their original use quite as thoroughly inverted as the yellow school bus.

Yellow buses symbolize safety and restraint on American roads. Not here in Congo.

“This bus is all about speed,” says Alfonse Musambu, a 39-year-old pastor of a Kinshasa church called The Chandeliers of Gold, sitting in a bus as it barrels across Kinshasa. “Pedestrians are used to it. They know how to get out of the way.” (source)

The American school buses end up in Central and South America, too. Sonny Merryman, a Virginia-based bus company is one of several American distributors who re-ship the buses overseas after about ten years of shuttling American kids. Once they land in their new home, they are customized as needed.

via Flickr: mattbuch

Which leads to an interesting view of quintessentially American products (like the yellow school bus) as just a snapshot in time and space when Americans happen to be the ones using something. In the frame before, a mountain of Canadian ore, and after it, a vessel for transporting chickens. Quiet down in the back please…

NYC and SF are full of “wildposted” wheat paste poster advertising on shuttered buildings and construction sites. Apparently, in NYC anyway, they’re put up illegally by a private advertising company. Two people named Jordan Seiler and Posterboy launched a fullscale attack on the wildpostings this month, whitewashing all of them in a day and coming back with a crew of artists to repopulate the blank canvases with new artwork.

In the intro, the project is explained as a “takeback of public space”. Video here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKYwJ5wKeCU]