Beneath the surface of the locked down world the oxygen is running low. The tiny life support capsules sustaining our presence in the airless vacuum of millions of hard-drives, can only sustain three dimensional life for so long. It is time to head for the surface, but not too rapidly.
So how do we get past the problem of perception, access and desire. Life is about dialogue, that is how we learn. We educate ourselves through experience, we find the edge of our zone of comfort and understanding and we push past it, through to what lies beyond.
So, 2023 is still a thing; by which I mean Leeds2023. Despite the fact that Brexit put paid to any opportunity for UK cities to present their wares on a European stage, Leeds has committed itself to ensuring that 2023 remains an important year for the city in terms of culture; despite the funding and exposure being cut off by political dispute.
When we lose a sense of purpose we lose our sense of the future, and that is where hopelessness slips into the void and feeds our deepest fears. That is the point at which the sun sets never to rise again.
It is hardly surprising, that since reopening BasementArtsProject in August, the nature of the exhibitions have been somewhat political. Pushing through a time of great turmoil and upheaval as we are doing right now, things that have been bubbling under for a long time have quite predictably and reasonably come to the surface.
During the Lockdown I received an update from the studio of Yol, and just before I left another video update arrived in which he appeared to be trapped inside the Coronaverse. I shall leave you with his emergency transmission.
At the studio in which I have spent the last four days, I pack up my things for the final time and prepare to head for the Torhaus. Today is the opening of the exhibition ‘Meine Welt Auf Corona’ and as soon as it is done I have to head back to the station so that I can catch my train home.
Today is essentially a free day. With the exhibition now fully installed and all of the tech stuff working properly, I can spend the day taking in some art elsewhere. I have arranged to meet Sylvia and Christiane at the Dusseldorf U building.
Moving out of lockdown, the world is opening up, a chasm to be filled by STEM courses at Universities where the arts are systematically destroyed in an attempt to keep the economy going.
Today I am meeting Viennese artists Christiana Spatt and Maria Hanl at the Torhaus. Maria’s work is a film piece and has already been installed, Christiane is a painter and photographer and her work is the final piece in the Corona jigsaw.
Yesterday in a special edition of the Lockdown Journal, we updated you on the status of the ‘Compressed Time Frames’ exhibition by ArtCouple, and today I bring you some material by Abdullah Adekola, poet and founder of the Black led and Leeds based poetry collective ‘Say It. With Your Chest’. We hope to be working with Adekola in the very near future, watch this space.
The city streets do not seem to be very busy with cars. There is a hire system for electric scooters, they are everywhere and people just leave them parked at the edge of the pavement. Bikes are also popular. Dortmund feels like a city with an environmental conscience.
Today, I depart for the Industrial Rhineland of Westphalia, specifically the city of Dortmund for an exhibition entitled ‘Meine Welt Auf Corona’ (My World After Corona).
The work of Lou Hazelwood and Chris Graham, when working as a duo, seeks to make sense of the slippage from one political and philosophical state to another.
The ‘Emergence’ exhibition looks at the energy that transforms material and gives new form to that which already exists. It is about the hand of the artist in the transformation process, the mind of the artist in the conception of the work and it is about the nature of the material being transformed.
As we emerge into a post-pandemic world, rubbing our eyes and blinking in the sunlight, the importance of the root system becomes apparent. The things that we thought may not survive did in fact just die back for an exceptionally long winter.
It is sometimes said that the final form of a sculpture might already be suggested by the shape of the starting piece. This might be true for irregular lumps of stone or wood, but when beginning with a square-sawn block, as I have done here, the final form is only limited by the sculptor’s imagination.
The question is how to achieve those elusive steps to improvement, how to train your vision on a new horizon and attempt to take people with you on that journey.
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Yol]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1635756549798-2YHKYICM9NDGQX3NEKXO/Screenshot+2021-11-01+at+08.47.39.png)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Travelogue 05]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1635717328362-QOB0TZPGLVRBWX4CHSEM/IMG_7045+2.jpeg)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Travelogue 04]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1635117880847-SRT6NNJDF9ZL9NB46L88/IMG_6872.JPG)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Lou Hazelwood]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1635112055249-DRPLKRKP6YYPLPCV9SBU/Circumvent%2C+Join+the+Dots.png)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Travelogue 03]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1635000200597-OLEKHCCN8KU8K8TKXNR2/IMG_6884.JPG)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Adekola]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1634834352930-VVHVCJ75MU04WTN9ALT7/Screenshot+2021-10-21+at+18.37.43.png)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Travelogue 02]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1634923502966-5QKJ51ZWVMFHIMHDP90Q/IMG_6768+4.JPG)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [ArtCouple]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1634830612369-EWYWYKRQU8FA5AQQ1J4Q/ArtCoupleShadow2.jpg)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Travelogue 01]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1634825417813-WTWG3XJLOI7BJB5PVY9E/IMG_6737.JPG)
