Transgressive Architecture.

The Bad Sheets in Trafalgar Square (In co-operation with pigeons and other nomads).

Monday, June 4th, 14:30-17:00

Silence has fallen on Trafalgar Square. No more pigeons cooing, no more children laughing.

The tourists do not stop there any more; they just pass by, disappointedly gazing at the voided square now that the pigeons are gone. It is the silence after the storm. Silence after the battle between the cleansing and purification brigade and the city's everyday life.

The war which was declared in the name of safety - in the name of beautification, and economic re-development , in the name of "the father", has never been given a name. This war has never been commemorated. Its victims have never been given a monument. But this war has never ended, and Trafalgar Square was not its only place. This war is being constantly fought in other streets, parks and squares, in every public place.

The Bad Sheets installation by Transgressive Architecture is the monument to this unspoken war. The Bad Sheets are the tombstones for the victims. The white Bad Sheets are the Taleet (the Jewish prying shroud) in which one clothes oneself every day and in which one is buried. The White Bad Sheets unfold to reveal a planning land use map, dyed in white by planners. In this map a process of suspension of the present occurs. But from these white tombs, these temporary monuments, these site specific maps that create non-places, the architecture of transgression is born.

The Bad-Sheets are not white. They have never been.

Taken from the private realm they have been stained in the public by images of streets vendors, prostitutes, buskers, cruisers for sex, the homeless, and protesters; they were stained by the dirt of their nomadic existence in London's public spaces. They will not be washed - they remember that "dirt is only matter out of place" and they do not have a proper place. They are placeless and temporary. Nevertheless, by the repetition of their appearance in London in different spaces and times, the Bad Sheets creates their home in the city. It is the repetition that makes a difference.

The Bad Sheet are "public art" which does not identify the public, and questions "Is it art?"

The Bad Sheets create a space, which can generate endless possibilities. Misuse it. Use it. Or don't.

The Bad Sheets are fertile mobile platforms. We invite you to dance.

Transgressing the boundaries of cleansed public space the Bad Sheets create boundless space, open and inclusive. Don't watch this space, inhabit it - carry it with you.

The Bad Sheets, is the intervention of the Transgressive Architecture group - a collaboration of artists, architects, a photographer, a writer and a film maker. The group was formed in March 2001 to re-think and react in London's public space. The Bad Sheets is a temporary and nomadic public art installation. The Bad Sheets are site specific installations in contested public places, but they also reflect the general conditions of social cleansing in London's public space.

Launched in March 2001, in front of the RIBA, the Bad Sheet intervention generated a statement by Lord Richard Rogers, head of the Urban Task Force, and London city architects, that supported the right of marginalized communities such as homeless people, beggars, prostitutes, participants in public sex, buskers, and protesters, to act in the public space. In May, in the Charing Cross underpass, the Bad Sheets brought to the public's attention the new by-law which its mere purpose is to evict the houseless people that find shelter in this place. The Bad Sheets in Trafalgar Square protests against the cleansing of the pigeons which has led to the demise of the square as a tourist attraction. The pigeons gave the rigid and monumental square some qualities that architects struggle to achieve currently in their works: mutation, mobility, hybridism, fluidity, temporality and volatility. The pigeons made the square a space of event. The Bad Sheets in Trafalgar square is a public art intervention which tries to restore these qualities.

The next Bad Sheets interventions will deal with the cleansing of sex activity from parks, and the cleansing of artists from streets and squares.