Mark Wallinger with Bénédicte Ramade

Bénédicte Ramade interviews Mark Wallinger

From 2001 until 2006, Brian Haw patiently constructed a protest camp next to the House of Parlement in London. The 40 meter spontaneous architecture of pictures, banners, posters, moaning teddy bears and many daily supplies were removed by 78 policemen and trashed in May 2006. A new law was introduced forbidding any demonstration within a zone of one kilometer around the House of Parlement, due to potential terrorist threat. Haw's pacifist camp, settled in this zone, was erased in one night. Fascinated for months by the involvement of Brian Haw and the commitment of the people, Mark Wallinger started to take some hundred or so pictures over the months before the destruction. After Wallinger decided to precisely recreate Haw's installation at the Tate Britain, then exhibited for 8 months, within the security perimeter. This demonstration booth against the war in Irak is now on view in France near Paris, at MACVAL.
read the interview

Six kinds of smoke

Greenwashing. Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities
Foundation Sandretto Re Rebaudango, Turin Feb-May

On Thursday night (28 Feb) Greenwashing. Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities opened in foggy, smoggy Turin. The European Union has recently warned that the city is consistently overstepping its smog and pollution limits in terms of days per year. Yet people are beginning to flock to this beautiful baroque city that was, until the winter Olympic Games, almost without tourists. I guess most of the art people arrived by plane. At the after-party in the city centre a bulbous cloud seeped and leaked up from a grill in the street and completely covered the people smoking outside the bar. Half fled and left the scene the rest sat there obliviously chatting in the late night. The explosion was in fact a spontaneous work by French artist Cyprien Gaillard using an industrial fire extinguisher. The impromptu gesture directly echoes his works in the exhibition which deal with “vandalized... graffiti-like,‘en plein air’ pollution clouds [that] redraw the landscape” and cite the conflict and disharmony in which the world began and thrives. In one clean moment maybe half the audience recognised it was a work.
Geoff Lowe