Hotel Ballymun

Breaking Ground, the Per Cent for art programme for Ballymun, Dublin, Ireland.

Breaking Ground, the percent for art programme for Ballymun Regeneration Limited, was launched in Ballymun in February 2002. To date Breaking Ground has launched some of the most significant, diverse and challenging public art projects in the history of the Irish State, and as such is widely recognised as the flagship for contemporary public art projects in Ireland. Breaking Ground has commissioned a huge variety of contemporary art projects, from permanent light works by artists such Corban Walker, to large scale temporary projects such as Seamus Nolan's 'Hotel Ballymun', which saw an abandoned tower block converted into a short stay hotel for one month. Breaking Ground is committed to being a continual and progressive resource within the local community. Breaking Ground is also keen to create intelligent debate and discussion about contemporary art, challenging perceptions about what can be achieved within communities. As such Breaking Ground has 2 key aims: to bring attention nationally and internationally to projects organised within Ballymun; and to expand and enrich the lives of communities through experiences with contemporary art. Breaking Ground is currently nearing the end of its second phase of commissions, and will launch artworks in Autumn 2008 by artists such as Cecily Brennan, John Byrne, Kevin Atherton and Martin Healy. Contact website: www.breakingground.ie

Summer Festivals

Breathing Places Festival - Brooke Park: Derry

Sun 2nd August
Time: 1pm - 5pm

Join us in historic Brooke Park and be inspired by the lovely city council Wildlife Garden - an entry in the Ireland Garden Show. Try your hand at making some of the wildlife features from the garden, or go for a guided walk, talk to gardening experts and enjoy music, food and children's activities.

URBAN/ ACT. Monday, 2 June, 6pm @ PS²

Presentation and talk of URBAN/ ACT, a handbook for creative urban actions.
Speakers: Doina Petrescu (aaa) and Fiona Woods (Ground Up).
Time: 6pm @ PS²
Launch of a new handbook of contemporary urban practice from across europe (tactical, situational and active) -considered in relation to ongoing work on creative rural practices in Ireland.
URBAN / ACT, edited by aaa (atelier d’architecture autogérée), Paris/2007 ISBN 978-2-9530751-0-6 is the outcome of a series of discussions and collaborations with a number of groups from France, Belgium, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Spain, Croatia, Slovenia and Canada.
The practices presented include artist groups, media activists, cultural workers, software designers, architects, students, researchers, neighbourhood organisations, city dwellers. Most of these groups are usually catalogued as local and their position is minimalised as such, but in fact they are highly specific and have the quality of reinventing uses and practices in ways that traditional professional structures cannot afford (due to their generic functioning). Their ways of being local are complex and multilayered, involving participation and local expertise as well as extra-local collaborations. They reinvent contemporary urban practice as tactical, situational and active, based on soft professional and artistic skills and civic informal structures, which can adapt themselves to changing urban situations that are critical, reactive and creative enough to produce real change.

URBAN/ACT focuses mainly on groups in cities and their activities in a dense urban environment, representing a dominance and assumed monopoly of city culture. In the predominantely rural context of Ireland, does the urban act need to change its methods and strategies; does rural act mean a slower pace, from hardedge challenging to organic soft and comforting? Fiona Woods will analyse examples of creative rural practice in Ireland and re-balance the citycentricity with a RURAL/ACT appendix.

Doina Petrescu is reader in architecture at the University of Sheffield. She has written, lectured and practised individually and collectively on issues of gender, technology, (geo)politics and poetics of space. Together with Constantin Petcou, she is founder member of atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa) and has also been an activist with local associations in UK, France Romania and Senegal and feminist research groups such as association (des pas) in Paris and taking place in London. Editor of Altering Practices: Feminist Politics and Poetics of Space (London: Routledge, 2007) and co-editor of Architecture and Participation (London: Routledge, 2005) . The aaa collective initiated and edited URBAN/ACT.
atelier d’architecture autogérée / studio of self-managed architecture (aaa) is a collective platform, which conducts actions and research concerning urban mutations and cultural, social and political emerging practices in the contemporary city. http://www.urbantactics.org
Fiona Woods is a visual artist; her practice includes curating and writing. For the last number of years her work has focused on questions of art and public space in non-metropolitan contexts. Recent commissions include Imagining Silvermines; a psychogeography (as visual-artist-in-residence for North Tipperary, 2007) and a collaborative R&D residency for Grizedale Arts, UK (ongoing). She devised and curated the Ground Up programme of public art in rural contexts for Clare Arts Office and co-devised the Shifting Ground partnership project between Clare Arts Office and GMIT. She is editor of the forthcoming publication Ground Up; re-positioning art in the context of the rural (2008). www.shiftingground.net

To read/ download URBAN/ACT on the web, see http://www.peprav.net/tool/spip.php?rubrique30