Category: News

Draw to Perform symposium comes to Goldsmiths Design Festival

Rachel Grant at a previous Draw to Perform, photo by Marco Berardi
Rachel Grant at a previous Draw to Perform, photo by Marco Berardi

Draw to Perform is an international symposium curated by Israeli-born artist Ram Samocha and focused on the connection between performance art and drawing. If you’re interested to see with your own eyes how such a connection works in practice, you’re in luck, as Draw to Perform is coming to Goldsmiths Design Festival!

The event will include video screenings, live drawing performances, talks and lectures by artists and art historians. The artists performing at Goldsmiths will be:

Rachel Grant– a visual artist living in Aberdeen; “her practice is process led, stemming from a fundamental curiosity in the act of making itself.”

Katrina Brown, interdisciplinary choreographer;

Poppy Jackson  , who”makes actionist work exploring the female body as an autonomous zone.”

Ram Samocha and Roberto Feo of El Ultimo Grito will introduce the symposium and participate in a panel discussion with the artists after the performances.

Draw to Perform at Goldsmiths will take place on 5 September starting 10 am, in Room LG02 of the Professor Stuart Hall Building. To book your free place, email ram_samocha@yahoo.com.

Image source: Draw to Perform Facebook page

Illegal Town Planning: Rhyl at Goldsmiths Design Festival

What would community town planning with local people look like? A project at our upcoming Goldsmiths Design Festival explores this idea in an exhibition focused on the Welsh town of Rhyl.

“The intention is not necessarily to produce a viable town plan, but to create a forum where local ideas about a town’s future might be discussed and presented in different ways. The project is intended as a platform for local participants to express personal visions through ambitious, large scaled plans. We hope to capture these moments through films, drawings, photography, (fictional) town planning documents and schemes as well as the architecture that will make up ‘Master Plans.’ The process hopes to reveal the ideas or concerns of local people and show ambitious ideas that would not normally be given a platform. These plans are given licence to be single-minded, devoid of bureaucracy, detached from financial reality and ambitious”.

The project is led by renowned designer and Goldsmiths lecturer Jimmy Loizeau, together with a team that includes other Goldsmiths staff and alumni: Tee Byford Flockhart, Neil Crud, Charlie Evans, Hannah Fasching, Hefin Jones, Lynne Jones, Paula Jones, Belen Palacios and Matthew Ward. The exhibition will be on all throughout the Festival (3-9 September) in the Kingsway Corridor of the Richard Hoggart Building at Goldsmiths; artist guided talks will take place on 3 and 4 September.

 

Opening Lecture at Goldsmiths Design Festival: Maarten Gielen of ROTOR

rotor
Rotor work: ‘Behind the Green Door’

In case you still weren’t convinced that our upcoming Goldsmiths Design Festival will be unmissable, we are proud to announce that we will open with a lecture from designer and researcher Maarten Gielen, founding member of Rotor collective, on 3 September at 7 pm. The lecture will take place in room LG02 of the Professor Stuart Hall Building, and it is free to attend: just book your place on the Goldsmiths website.

Rotor is “a group of architects, designers and other professionals interested in material flows in industry and construction, particularly in relation to resources, waste, use and reuse. Rotor disseminates creative strategies for salvage and waste reduction through workshops, publications and exhibitions.” It began in 2005 in Belgium, and in 2010 they represented their country at the 2010 Architecture Biennale in Venice. Amongst their many achievements, they curated ‘Ex Limbo’ for the Prada Foundation in Milan, investigating the architectural and scenographic elements of Prada and OMA fashion shows, as well  ‘Behind the Green Door’, an exhibition on the challenges facing sustainable architecture, at the 2013 Oslo Architecture Triennale. Last year, they created a separate spin-off identity called Rotor Deconstruction, which specialises in the dismantling of large-scale office interiors. Take your time going through  their website to find out more about Rotor’s many other groundbreaking projects.

Rotor work @ Bomel - Picture by Jean François Flamey - JeanFrancoisFlamey_31102014_4083
Rotor work: ‘Abbatoirs de Bomel’

From 3rd – 9th September Goldsmiths’ Department of Design opens its doors to the public for a week of free events bringing together some of the most significant names in the design industry and showcasing the incredible work of its staff and students.