Adrift in urban voids
Formerly a journalist and now an “ad hoc curator” focusing on the forgotten spaces in cities, Francesca Ferguson brings renewal to exhibition architecture – and to the architecture exhibition.
The way in which Francesca Ferguson entered the profession of art curator differed from the usual. When the Berlin wall fell she was in the city reporting for British ABC News. When her contract ran out she remained on the continent to monitor events in Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union and the iron curtain collapsed.
Extensive travel
After several years of travelling extensively through the various new republics she began to feel that the rapid tempo of news reporting was no longer an adequate way of addressing the issues that interested her. She began to work on proposals for exhibitions for various institutions and, in due course, started producing exhibitions herself outside the conventional institutions – “ad hoc curating” as she terms it.
“I was in contact with the alternative architectural scene in Berlin but also in London where the economic situation meant that masses of architects could not longer get commissions for buildings. Many younger architects chose to join the art world. They developed a different understanding of how the city and the urban landscape might be change, activated and influenced.
“At this time, in the mid 1990s, there were masses of empty buildings in Berlin that one could use for exhibitions. For example there were buildings that were right by the Berlin wall or new buildings with no occupants. We could use these as temporary exhibition venues. There were fantastic opportunities for presenting exhibitions.”
You mean that economic recessions can represent good times for visionaries?
“Perhaps not, but necessity is the mother of invention. One could say that the lack of commissions created a discourse in which people could question the role and nature of public places, questions about how the city is programmed, designed, monitored, etc. Architects and artists collaborated in order to influence the general discourse on architecture.
Shaking life into the debate
One of Francesca’s first exhibitions was called “Stadtluft macht frei” [City air brings freedom]. This was shown right by Checkpoint Charlie and was a group show that reflected on the changing urban landscape. Among the people taking part was Sophie Ricket who exhibited, for the first time, the photographs of herself urinating on various buildings in London’s financial district while standing up.
“This sort of project shook some life into the debate about urbanism and architecture and made it accessible to a wider public.”
An apology for pursuing issues
Ten years after the fall of the Berlin wall she produced the exhibition “Big Blue” together with curator Peter Lewis. This was shown at cafés in both East and West Berlin. The invited artists and architects were encouraged to create works that were political in intent, preferably posters or videos. “At this time political discussions in cafés and public places were declining and we wanted to bring them back. Above all, the exhibitions were some sort of excuse for promoting these issues in public discussion”, Francesca explains. They were often created very quickly at low cost and using simple technology.
Aimless walks
It was at this time that she developed her trademark “Urban Drift” which she still uses for organizing exhibitions, seminars and suchlike. The word drift is borrowed from the Situationists’ dérive meaning to divert or drift. The Situationists wandered aimlessly about in various urban environments, checking on how they were influenced emotionally by what they experienced. From this they developed theories about how physical environments influence people’s feelings.
Francesca is interested in the periphery, the less-known territories of the city, as well as post-industrial landscapes. Areas that city planners and architects often avoid or ignore because they are complicated to deal with. They are badly and randomly planned or not planned at all.
90-metre photographic panorama
In the exhibition “Deutschlandscape”, Germany’s contribution to the architectural biennial in Venice, she chose to concern herself more closely with forgotten urban landscapes. “We collected photographs of such places in German cities and assembled them into a 90-metre photographic panorama, a single Photoshop file. In this panorama we let architects mount images of buildings that they would like to see in these locations: courageous, daring new forms and dynamic architecture.
“Deutschlandscape” was unique as an exhibition of architecture in that it did not contain a single model. Instead, the public moved along the panorama that wound its way through the room; an installation that was two and three-dimensional at the same time.
Transparent layers
For two years Francesca was director of the museum of architecture in Basle where she continued to work in the same way that she had done previously. The exhibition “As Found” worked with the concept of provisional aesthetics, focusing on architecture that has been transformed and adapted to new uses with the minimal possible changes. The exhibition consisted mostly of photographs in several transparent layers, with the original structure at the bottom and the additions mounted above. In this way it was possible to present the materials, the textures of the buildings and the new additions side by side. All the objects and pictures were placed on packing cases and the influence on the room was minimal according to Francesca. “We wanted the provisional aspects to be visible in the exhibition hall too.”
“A large machine”
In 2006 she produced an exhibition called “Talking Cities” at Zollverein a coal-refining plant that had long since been abandoned in Hessen in northern Germany. The plant was designed in the Bauhaus style and was opened in 1932. After deteriorating for a number of years following its closure during the 1980s, it was added to the UNESCO world heritage list. Francesca was commissioned to develop an exhibition inside the plant together with a number of other institutions.
“The site covers several square kilometres and contains all imaginable sorts of spaces. There is the refining factory itself, a plant for sorting coal into different qualities before sending it off on trains, etc. The entire site is a huge machine and when it was in production there were very few people actually working there. Today the structures are rusty and dilapidated though all the lines are surprisingly elegant in their simplicity.
“We had access to a space measuring about 500m2 at the top of the building. I wondered what we would be allowed to do with this venue since it is included on the UNESCO list. We were not allowed to fasten anything onto the walls or pillars.
“The brief was to show new design in the plant. It felt strange introducing innovative design into this venue.”
Conceptual bazaar
Francesca solved the problem by creating a fairly simple structure of columns, a “plug-in” structure within the room which allowed more additions than the original space. 37 organizations and individuals were commissioned to create installations in the room.
“It became a conceptual bazaar, a venue for ideas in which architects, designers and other people working with urban development on a small scale, but who all make a mark in the public domain, met up.”
Urban interventions
Among those taking part was “Temporary Gardens” a Berlin movement that creates gardens in abandoned places. Stephan Rehtig, a Leipzig architect, had previously designed a library made from beer crates that he piled up on a square in a rather run-down part of the city. He brought his beer-crate library to the exhibition.
“We gathered all of these urban interventions into a series of installations that jointly documented a micro-political vision. We created a critical mass, a multiplicity of socially and politically conscious design.
A “conceptual bazaar” sounds like a very exciting way of describing the exhibition!
“Indeed, if the exhibition is about informal movements and trends the term is very appropriate. To a degree I was influenced by what the cities look like in the Balkans where many styles are to be found in a very small space; a building from the communist era side by side with a modern, rapidly erected kiosk next to a hypermodern bank headquarters.
Trans-disciplinary philosophy
Everything Francesca does has its point of departure in a trans-disciplinary culture in which numerous different modes of expression and professional expertise leave their marks on the final result. Such an open attitude towards different disciplines has become more common among curators today, Francesca maintains, not least in the field of architecture.
Mårten Janson