‘Blankat’ is a community engagement performance that took place at the Oakshott Court Car Park Rooftop Terrace, in Polygon Road Estate, Somers Town NW1, London during a public performance program, ‘Temporary Reality’ hosted by Chalton Gallery during the Frieze Art Week. 

This project uses the idea of “playfulness” as a vehicle to reveal the absence of diversity in the shared community space within the urban cityscape. In this context, it’s important to understand ‘diversity’ from a distant point of view, that takes into account of the invisible tenants who used to live in the council estate and were forced to move out when they didn’t have the “right to buy”.  It looks into the low-rise infill project that was part of a larger urban landscape architectural development designed in late 1960s and completed after the 1973 recession (completed in 1976)when Margret Thatcher came into power. The low-rise infill modernist housing project was employed as a beneficiary scapegoat by Thatcher, using the slogan ‘right to buy’ in 1979, to sell off the assets the postwar state has built up. 

During the public performance, I invited performance artist Eunjung Kim to join me to play the role of two playground facilitators in the shared community space. We spent a month doing site-specific observation and field research. During the research process, we used performance exercises to test the kinesthetic experience of moving against the boundary of the architectural design of the housing estate. During the performance, in the backdrop of a sign that says, ‘No ball game’, the two playground facilitators, who dressed in blue overalls as their “working costume”, allegedly self-approbated rights to repurpose the ready-made architectural landscape as a playground for “ball game”. The performance intervention is an artistic visual iteration of Karen Barad’s diffractive practice (Barad, 2007), that ‘does not merely signify the disruption of representationalism and its metaphors of reflection in the endless play of images and its anxieties about copy and original and displacements of the Same else-where’. By “planting” evidence of inhabitance using yellow stickers and oversize yellow air balloons as the main performance materials available for the public to interact and play with, it challenges the inherent separability of community and culture through the process of marking limits of boundaries for mobility. The new shape, pattern, and objects that we used in the performance were considered as a tactic of intervention, which simultaneously invades and re-imagines the present architectural landscape. The two performers use role-playing to allow themselves not to be gripped by the tropology of ‘sameness elsewhere’, but to enable the engagement of the differential becoming that organically take place through the act of playing.

The site-specific performance intervention draws a parallel relationship between Thatcher’s feigned egalitarianism and the performers’ fictitious authority. It is suggested that the community has gone from being a sociological concept to a more elusive conceptual idea to eliminate differences and diversities in the urban space, which posits the idea of community as a wrongful placeholder for incoherence. This project offers a critical discussion of the idea of community, which has become just an authoritarian world, rather than a mobilizing tool for creating possible space for individuals to join. 

The second stage of the project is suspended due to Eunjung’s recent leave of the UK. Originally, we were supposed to do a live performance in simulation with the film composed of the documentation of the public performance made from the drone camera in the Chalton Gallery, which is 2 minutes walking distance from the Oakshott housing estate. Two performers would displace the chorographical movements from the previous public intervention in a gallery space installed with dome surveillance cameras, which is a metaphorical illustration of the yellow dots and stickers that we used in the public performance. This is now postponed with Eunjung’s recent leave and Covid-19. 

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Ada Xiaoyu Hao

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