“... what does it matter, so long as they are talking about the same thing, about the quasi-object they have all created, the object-discourse-nature society whose new properties astound us all and whose network extends from my refrigerator to the Antarctic by way of chemistry, law, the State, the economy, and satellites [...] However, we do not have to create this Parliament out of whole cloth, by calling for yet another revolution. We simply have to ratify what we have always done [...] Half of our politics is constructed by (and) in science and technology. The other half of Nature is constructed in societies, Let us patch the two back together, and the political task can begin again.”
- Bruno Latour (We have never been Modern)

Units Moved, slipped right into this discussion about the politics of an artifact and the loss that is suffered with every definition or name. Thinking we know what something is, makes it easier to communicate. There is birth in a name, but death in it too and Units Moved looked for life between the two. It was a group show, where eleven different artists were asked to explore re-appropriations of urban spaces. Some of these appropriations related to specific urban streets and places, showing how different places can be temporarily reconfigured, such as Toby Paterson’s interpretations of modernist tower blocks and Sam Griffin’s reconstruction of Nazi plans for Jersey. In other works, such as the video piece from Alex Hartley and the site specific installation by Kathy Barber, there was an evident concern for the ways in which we design, draw, write and remember. These investigated the notion that specific artistic practices are in and of themselves open to unusual borrowings and interventions and what some of the implications of this may be.

Whatever the exact motif or modus operandi behind each of these works, the thin red line scaling the bumps and tying Units Moved together, was the idea that with appropriated space comes a particular kind of beauty that is born of strange and unpredictable sites and moments – sometimes a flash of colour or a turn of form, sometimes a sparkling idea or odd proposition, sometimes an uncertain action or provisional event, but always an imaginative reworking of the myriad possibilities of city life. Possibility is perhaps the blueprint for the Units Moved project … the scratches on what ‘should be,’ that reveal what ‘might have been’ or give us something to dream about.

“We tried to reflect interesting and different ways in which architecture can be re-appropriated, recycled and re-used. Just like a skateboarder views a bench as something more than a surface to sit on, or how a homeless person perceives a doorway as a place to sleep.”
-R.Holland

The sum of the work is a conversation of skillfully expressed opinions. As part of this event, two solid stone (and skateable) sculptures were installed at the South bank centre, London. These sculptures are a continuation of the ‘Moving Units’ project produced by the TSEOU back in 2004. The sculptural pieces, the ‘Moving Units’ are stand alone forms playing with the perception of public furniture; when is a bench a bench and what is a bench anyway? These pieces are intended to challenge the concept of what street furniture ‘should’ be used for and the aesthetic value of an artifact in direct relation to its use(s).

“Because we are told and perceive that a bench is an object to sit on, is that all it might be?” From my perspective a bench is a skateable object or sometimes a sculpture, which, you can also sit on. The more I dive deeper into such topics, the more I explore the complex interrelationship between people and the constructed modern environment, commenting, exploring and visualising ways in which architecture is reappropriated. Skateboarding just so happens to be a great example of this” - R.Holland

Years later, the boy saw what he had once called a bench. It had the strong four legs of a bench. It had the flat, long, hard shelf of a bench. It even had two wooden planks where you can rest your back. “Bench,” the boy said to himself. He knew the dictionary definition by heart. He remembered the man’s words. Still, he could not see a bench.

So how does this story, end? Well, based on the video that just came into my mailbox, it doesn’t … at last look, the organizers of Units Moved were rolling one of their sculptures off a ramp and onto a virgin street about to be scraped. What’s underneath?

To answer this we turn to the cemetery of Pere Lachaise, the corps of Victor Hugo who never saw a skateboard and still manages to reinforce Holland’s thought that skateboarding is a great example of all this and if we follow Holland, we can replace ‘art’ with ‘skating’ in this quote:

“The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.” – Victor Hugo

Words: HL