Estate
How can artists respond (both practically and artistically) to the grim post-pandemic world and its aftermath? A glimpse of an answer might be about to arrive in Edinburgh’s Muirhouse as Jimmy Cauty’s new installation, ESTATE, looks set to be transported for a month long residency from the end of May and throughout June 2021. As a first response to the covid experience it is dark but also comic reflecting the absurdity of the contemporary moment. ESTATE is a dystopian model village experience featuring four abandoned concrete tower blocks at 1:24 scale (approx 2 metres high) housed in a 40-foot shipping container. The tower blocks each serve a different function in the ESTATE and contain amusing scenes of mass social, economic and environmental devastation.
In 2015, the Aftermath Dislocation Principle was installed in Banksy’s Dismaland in Weston Super Mare before being housed in a 40-foot shipping container and touring more than 35 sites of historical rioting and public dissent in the UK. ESTATE is the bastard offspring of the Aftermath Dislocation Principle updated for the post-pandemic urban hellscape. If bespoke outdoor installations point the way to how you put on events in a covid world – the content speaks to the haunted urban landscape dominated by surveillance, death and disfiguring inequality. Dark and small-scale-interactive it looks like exactly the sort of artwork needed for us all returning to the “new normal”.
A new publication will be produced by the Society of Spectacles to coincide with ESTATE. The publication will include new material by acclaimed Scottish writers Laura Hird (Nail and Other Stories (1997) and Born Free (1999) and Gordon Legge, who’s first collection of stories, In Between Talking about the Football, was hailed by the New York Times as a ‘cult classic’. The publication will be available during ESTATEEdinburgh and at www.societyofspectacles.co.uk.
L-13 Light Industrial Workshop is a creative platform founded in 2003 by artist Steve Lowe, L-13 develop projects both ambitious and diminutive, publish books, make prints and other artwork editions, convert impractical artistic visions to reality, promote a playful polemical spirit to irritate, offend and delight. L-13 explores alternative viewpoints and radical strategies, never passively presenting art where more dynamic engagements can be implemented.
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Ah, the apocalypse again.
In the future everyone will get 15 minutes of privacy.
I wish everyone would just stop yakking on about artistic this and creative that. I read the Prospectus a couple of years back and expressed an interest. When some of the Units came up for sale I took on a proprietorial role in Camp Delta Zulu when I acquired a social impact investment bond through Mr Cauty’s agents at L-13. With yield increasing at guaranteed rates, some great returns are promised. I was able to visit my Unit on Floor 10 of the Children’s Prison (Social Media Intelligence Gathering Systems, Water Boarding and Light Torture/ Correctional Thinking Zone). I suggest people should invest now to build back a better tomorrow – TODAY!