Pictures Not Homes

Ian Dawson, Louisa Minkin, Francis Summers

This is a text about homes and about pictures.
An account of a concrete project. Some questions about regeneration and the arts.
We are living in the inner-city interstices of 'development': bettering, regeneration. Marooned on our doorsteps, our locality is being emptied and torn. We walk and watch and record. Our project, a floating ligan marking the wreck. We tell the story of digging in to our site: a multi-layered project with entangled narrative encompassing different voices, temporalities and spaces. We capture data with archaeological method in Southwark, in the Home Counties: both dark ages, then and now. We produce files as exhibition. The files travel, re-forming. The sites collapse. We move from archaeological dig to questions of urban organization and inauguration.

Pictures not homes: posed as a question about dwelling. Walls as boundaries and divisive
markers, doors as that which can allow access but that can dictate stasis, windows as pictorial
‘seeing through’. Files without recto or verso.
We present the traces of remnants of houses and businesses from streets in the sky, from a
community that did not arrive as planned. Homes not pictures: the found words of occupiers
protesting the regeneration of the Aylesbury estate from which these picture-objects-files come.
RTI and 3D scans are used with archaeological methodology gone lumpen. An exploration of the
relation of lived-in space to the non-spatial format of the digital, a project addressing the
disappearance of place; the obdurateness of material; the liquidity of media and capital. Sandbags
and code. Flexibility and opacity.
Or.
A is for front line.
An alphabetical anomaly; we start with struggle, with a conflict between forms-of-life.
B is for backwardsness.
Also known as nachtraglichkeit.
A is for afterwardsness, then.
A retro-active understanding, a looping.
B is for belated understanding. Memory reprinted from later experience.
C is for concatenation, constituent, components, construction
class
culture
comedy
Class War, Colonisation of everyday life, or Capitalism as Crisis.
Consumption or the Common.
Commodities and Counselling.

Pictures Not Homes
Ian Dawson, Louisa Minkin, Francis Summers
Artist strategies and methods of resistance in the regenerated city
Nordic Geographers Meeting, Stockholm 18-21 June 2017 

PICTURES NOT HOMES SYMPOSIUM
26 January 2017 hosted by AMT Research Group, The Winchester Gallery 


PICTURES NOT HOMES
Louisa Minkin and Ian Dawson
12 - 28 January 2017
The Winchester Gallery at Winchester School of Art

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/wsa/news/2017/01/pictures-not-homes-ian-dawson-and-louisa-minkin.page

Gestures of Resistance 
curated by Jean Wainwright, Centre Romantso, Athens, Greece
20.04.2017 - 30.04.2017

Bill Balaskas, Pavel Büchler, Broomberg and Chanarin, Edward Chell, Ian Dawson, Craig Fisher, Alfredo Jaar, Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps, Steffi Klenz, Małgorzata Markiewicz, Louisa Minkin, Francis Summers, Terry Perk, Julian Rowe, Yorgos Sapountzis, Bob and Roberta Smith, Socratis Socratous, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jessica Voorsanger, Stuart Whipps

http://gesturesofresistance.com/