During the recent Covid-19 lockdowns our windows gave us both distance from and proximity to our surroundings, an uneasy combination of separation and exposure, but allowing us to stay in touch with neighbours and welcome changes in season. Normally thresholds for us to open up to the world they then limited our choices, providing controllable, if fragile, barriers from risk and danger. Whilst these times brought isolation, separation and loss, we also discovered fresh opportunities to explore what home means and new digital ways of inviting people into our spaces for celebration and enjoyment. Tempo Arts is delighted to have worked with five international artists to present ‘Your Place’, our digital on-line project which offered perspectives during the lockdown and beyond.
Artists
Greig Burgoyne
Negotiations is a film you can interact with to recall times of restricted movement during the Covid-19 crisis. Restrictions on our movements gave us the opportunity to look on spaces in new ways, letting us investigate places we would normally not consider at all. Locations chosen by the artist were either normally too busy to be able to measure and scrutinise or were areas in the midst of the public realm which we would have normally regarded as having little or no significance whatsoever.
Claudia Kappenberg
The Hastings Book of the Earth – Funerals that have been and funerals yet to come explored what death meant to people living in Hastings during the Covid-19 pandemic. It reflected on the significance of rituals associated with death, reminding us that death is an integral part of life. Many people lost loved ones during these times but were not able to attend funerals or say their farewells in the ways they would have wished. The book is organised as five journeys through locations and landscapes in Hastings which built on written contributions from local people.
Hastings Book of the Earth – Funerals that have been and funerals yet to come
Tom Cardew
#lockdownwander examined the softer power of our non-verbal communication as something that can side-step or transcend bounds of the written word, both in close relationships and in the wider world. A question of togetherness, of care and of solidarity and how these are and can be expressed through signals and gestures. The artist used images of hands: the gestures they make, and how the hand in cartoon form can become an image of a person.
Marcos Vidal Font
Balearic Appropriationist Map BAM drew on the artist’s collection of more than one hundred silkscreens of logos collected by the artist of former companies, bars and restaurants in the Balearic Islands of Mallorca and Menorca which were impacted during the global economic downturn of the late 2000s. In this commission the artist draws parallels between the economic downturn and the recent global crisis of Covid-19, questioning how these times might be remembered in the future.
Neno Belchev
SHOW YOUR TONGUE! TAKE YOUR PLACE! involved viewers in a quiz-styled game which invited us to present images of ourselves with our tongues out and expect these to be comically manipulated for public display. Exhibited images depended upon the answers chosen by those playing but there were no right or wrong answers, more choices at a time when our alternatives had become restricted.
SHOW YOUR TONGUE! TAKE YOUR PLACE!
All images © the artists except where other services are employed.
The artists’ projects for Your Place were realised through the technical support and expertise of Nick Weekes.
Your Place’ was supported by public funding from Arts Council England’s Emergency Response Fund and East Sussex Arts Partnership.
