Three days into Notice of Reclamation, the screening room at art’otel London Hoxton filled up for a conversation hosted by The Beginning: Where Does an Idea Begin? Drinks in the gallery at 18:45, the talk at 19:00, and the show open around it — Mbari Memorial’s bronze ogene on their crates, the LED panel, the framed Mbari-motif prints, LOOTY’s holograms on the wall of crates.
The conversation
On the panel: Josh Proctor, Brand Director at The Beginning; Chidi Nwaubani, artist, designer and creative technologist; Sami Hayes, experiential designer and co-founder of Shai Space; Ruby Wright, Head of Creative Strategy at Nothing; and Ben Hayes, architect and co-founder of Unknown Works. The conversation was facilitated by Rudi Minto de Wijs.
The question was the title. Each of us came at it from a different practice — a brand, an artwork, a space, a product, a building — and the answers kept landing in the same place: not with the idea at all, but with the conditions around it. The people you are with, the constraint you are handed, the thing that was taken away. For Mbari Memorial, that was the question I kept returning to: what do you build when the original cannot be returned?
What cannot be returned intact must be collectively rethought.
In the room
Before the talk: the show, and the people arriving into it.
Notice of Reclamation, art’otel London Hoxton — before the talk.
The talk
Where Does an Idea Begin? — the screening room.
After
The room emptied back into the gallery and stayed there. Mbari Memorial is built to be touched — the bronze ogene on their crates close a circuit when two people hold them together — and by the end of the night most of the room had.
Back in the gallery.
Thank you
To The Beginning for hosting, to Ragga Muffin Curation, Frieze and Doyle Wham Gallery, to art’otel London Hoxton, and to everyone who came and stayed. The show runs until Sunday 25 October — open viewing is free, and private viewings can be booked with the gallery. The event listing is on DICE.
