The Bad Sheets in Russell and Bloomsbury Square.

An intervention by Transgressive Architecture against social cleansing of public spaces in London.

We invite you to a political protest / an art project / a funeral ceremony in public space.

Russell Square was a thriving public space, a day and night hive of activity. It was a place of gathering for strangers, locals and tourists, who were looking for companionship or same sex sex in an outdoor, non commercial, inclusive location. Last year, using architecture and landscape design, Camden Council decided to change the nature of this place. By lighting up the square, cutting the shrubs and bushes, and in the near future closer of square’s gates at night, activities and communities were evicted. Russell Square ceased to be a public space. Russell Square at night became a constructed void.

“The LBC warned those present that if Bloomsbury Square remained open 24 hours, it would be practically the only open space within the Borough to do so. The area would naturally attract undesirable characters from other areas where they have been recently displaced i.e. Russell Square”.

The same strategy of social cleansing by architectural means is going to take place in Bloomsbury Square, where the evicted communities and activities have found refuge after the changes in Russell Square. Again, architecture is deployed by local politicians as effective tool of social cleansing. These politicians feel that they do not have any obligation to the nomad communities who use public spaces in their borough, since these communities do not have an address or own a property in the area and hence do not have the right to vote. Unfortunately, many architects and urban planners have interpreted the term ‘community’ in the same way as politicians have i.e. residents or property owners, and while they serve these communities’ needs, they deny the accessibility of public spaces to other communities. As a result, London has been losing its urbanity to a suburban, homogenized, sterile, and non-democratic space in the past few years,.

If the objectives of the architectural profession are to create “inclusive and thriving public spaces” that “foster tolerance and radical thought” as Lord Richard Rogers, head of the Urban Task Force and London’s City Architect, wrote in his book “Cities for a Small Planet”, we must understand that public spaces always accommodate different communities which have different interests, some of which negate each other. Lord Rogers, in response to Transgressive Architecture’s first Bad Sheet intervention at the RIBA, acknowledged the complexity and antagonistic nature of the public space, and declared that he supports the right of marginalized communities and activities, such as beggars, homeless people, public sex participants, street vendors and others to act in public spaces.

Although it is much easier to design out what might be seen as disorderly, spontaneous, nomadic and miscellaneous activities, the challenge of the architectural and planning profession is to come out with designs that will allow them to exist . The Bad Sheets public art installation by Transgressive Architecture, is partly a proposal for such a design.

The Bad Sheets : A different take on art, architecture and the public space.

The Bad Sheets, a public art project, marks places and communities that have been cleansed from London’s public space. The Bad Sheets are the trace of these communities. They are the tombstones and monuments for their banishing from the public space. The white Bad Sheets are the Talit (the Jewish prying shroud) in which one clothes oneself every day and in which one is buried. The Bad Sheets are the Tabula Rasa or the white pages on which one transcribes. The Bad Sheets are planning land use maps, dyed in white by planners. In this map a process of suspension of the present occurs. But the white Bad Sheets are stained. The Bad Sheets are a stain.

The Bed Sheets became art objects because of their displacement. The Bad Sheets as art objects (first exhibited at the Warehouse Gallery, February 2001) were dead. Through their disappearance from the Gallery Space, and their temporary appearance in the public space they resurrected, their identity as art objects have been constantly broken and complicated by their repeated (dis)placements (Side walk in front of the RIBA 14/03, Charing Cross underpasses 27/05, Trafalgar Square 04/06). Indecisively they move between being an art object, a functional instrument, a political statement. In turn, their ghostly presence in public places transgresses the boundaries of urban spaces. Being moved, carried, unfolded, folded, installed, dismantled, confiscated, reclaimed, appearing for hours, disappearing for weeks, and appearing again, in these disturbed places, the Bad Sheets, create a space of event.

The Bad Sheets are…