CloseUp is a temporal public collaborative installation. Advocates Close was turned into a constructed space of multiple use; a landscape that invites social interaction and engagement with the site, its users and its history.
In exhibiting sculpture and installations in a temporal public garden and adjacent spaces on Advocate`s Close, we stage site specific work by local and international artists with backgrounds in visual art, architecture and performance.
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Curatorial concept
Our Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition aims to rethink the use of historical sites in the Old Town in using existing gaps and unused greenspaces amidst the century old fabric of the city center.
While romanticised picturesque views on the Old Town are being massively distributed in diverse visitor-targeted publications the closes (especially those not linking directly with the High Street) are notoriously overlooked and those spared from reconstruction and demolition still retain in parts their rough edges and quirky originality.
The project seeks to make use of the hidden niches and corners in Advocats close, to build a garden with sculpture and installation as temporal intervention, a transverse "gallery" for the duration of the Edinburgh Art Festival in August 2008.
The image of the eternally dark, secret and precarious fissure in the mass of buildings will be countered by an influx of contemporary artworks, which are embedded in a wider context of international outreach and critical engagement.
As much as the dramatic topography, elegant architecture and rich heritage build up to its fame, present-day Edinburgh does have to face all the typical issues of a modern metropolis. Albeit the well conserved, homogenous historical body of the inner city seems to speak a different, a historical language, it primarily is the space of the urban dwellers, of local communities and businesses and as such the old steps, closes and wynds have to support the logistics of modern everyday life.
Being subject to reshaping and profit making, still these places bear the notions of home and identification. This emotional momentum is related to the architecture and related to the given space. Into the midst of this city we would like to tie in the critical reflection about it.
What function and what impact does contemporary art have in an urban context? In answering this question it becomes necessary to devise new kinds of exhibition venues and methods.
We aim to create a city-specific and site-specific exhibition that invites exploration by the city user rather than the gallery pundit; an interaction that could convincingly engage with its time and place.
Patrick Geddes was a vigorous champion of the idea of public art and community gardens and he saw it in just this way, as a vehicle to express the communities shared values and experience, its history and identity. Our site at Advocates Close is one of those especially defined by Geddes more than a century ago to be used as communal open space.
The curatorial guideline for the participating artists should enhance the production of work that incorporates knowledge of the site, its past and present, but which at the same time remains autonomous in terms of materiality, aesthetic and theoretical approach etc.
As a consequence of the context specific approach to the exhibition project we are aiming to involve the local residents based in and around Advocate`s Close.
The invited artists should be willing and able to cooperate with local participants on an experimental and practical level.
Our project will be a show of collaborative, site specific installations and sculptures. An outdoor exhibition that operates on three contextual levels:
1.The historical site in Advocats Close in the heart of the Old Town, surrounded by A-listed buildings.
2. The temporal garden that works as a supporting structure for the artwork but also as a social space inviting and enhancing local interaction.
3. The given curatorial guideline of the three ideas of memory, home and dream, that invites artists to draw from the local collective archives, be it libraries or peoples stories, and to enable themselves to actively tie into this local urban context their own experience and creative process.