Thursday 12 June 2008, 18.00–20.00
Friday 13 June 2008, 09.30–18.30
Saturday 14 June 2008, 09.30–18.30

Part of Twentieth Birthday Celebrations

As Tate Liverpool celebrates 20 years on the dock, this exciting conference investigates the methods and meanings of urban regeneration in contemporary Liverpool and cities around the globe. Involving artists, architects, historians and cultural commentators, Magical Mysterious Regeneration Tour will provide a forum for critical debate on the purposes, benefits and costs of regeneration.

A significant part of the conference will be the opportunity for delegates to take part in a selection of Artist Led Mystery Tours of ‘regeneration’ sites in the city of Liverpool and its outskirts. Part of the conference will also be dedicated to a series of Postgraduate Research Fora, providing a platform for new research in the area of arts and regeneration.

Speakers at the main plenary sessions include artist Lara Almarcegui, architects Will Alsop and Sarah Wigglesworth, historians John Belchem and Richard Williams, and sociologist Saskia Sassen among others.

Venues include Tate Liverpool, The Bluecoat and Liverpool University.

 

Tate Liverpool  Foyer
£60 (£30 concessions), booking required
Price includes refreshments

CONFERENCE STRUCTURE

Thursday 12 June

TATE LIVERPOOL

18.00                Registration and collection of conference packs

18.15                Welcome and Introduction by Dr. Christoph Grunenberg (Tate Liverpool) and Professors Rob Kronenberg and John Belchem (University of Liverpool)

18.30 - 19.15     Film Screenings curated by the City in Film Research Project, School of Architecture and School of Politics and Communication Studies, University of Liverpool including Peter Leeson’s ‘Us & Them’ (1970) with an introduction by Leeson and City in Film

19.15 - 20.00     Drinks Reception, Tate Liverpool

Friday 13 June

THE BLUECOAT

10.00 - 12.30             'Artists Collectives and City Culture'

Lara Almarcegui, Bill Harpe, Raumlabor, Richard Williams

Chair: Bryan Biggs - Artistic Director, The Bluecoat

12.30 - 13.30           Lunch and visit to Variable Capital and 'Bouncer's performance at the Bluecoat

IN THE CITY

13.30 - 15.30           Artist Led Mystery Tours of Liverpool with Nina Edge, The Art Organisation and Imogen Stidworthy

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY

16.00 - 18.30          'Architects, Planning and the Politics of Regeneration'

Will Alsop, Jonathan Meades, Joseph Sharples and Sarah Wigglesworth

Chair: Professor Jonathan Harris - Liverpool School of Architecture's Centre for Architecture and the Visual Arts, University or Liverpool

19.00 - 20.00            Drinks Reception, University of Liverpool

Saturday 14 June

TATE LIVERPOOL

9.30 -12.30               Postgraduate Research Fora

'Creative Dwellings: City Space in Artistic Imaginings and Everyday Life' Chaired by Paul Sullivan, Static, Liverpool

'Building Utopias? Architecture, Planning and Urban Memory'. Chaired by Richard Koeck, City in Film, University of Liverpool

'Mapping Exclusion: Social Control and The Politics of Zoned City Space'. Chaired by Les Roberts, City in Film, University of Liverpool

12.30 - 1.30               Lunch, Tate Liverpool

13.30 - 15.30            Artist Led Mystery Tours of Liverpool with John Davies and The Art Organisation 

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY

16.00 - 18.30            'City Life: Poverty and Power around the World'. John Belchem, Ou Ning and Saskia Sassen

Chair: Felipe Hernandez - Liverpool School of Architecture Centre for Architecture and the Visual Arts, University of Liverpool

FURTHER INFORMATION ON PARTICIPANTS

Artists’ Collectives and City Culture

Chaired by Bryan Biggs, Director of The Bluecoat

Bill Harpe is a freelance dancer, choreographer and producer and has directed projects such as the Commonwealth Arts Festival in Cardiff (1965) and the opening ceremony of the Metropolitan Cathedral, Liverpool, 1967. In the same year, he became co-founder of The Blackie - Britain’s first community arts project, where he still works today as both artist and administrator. He has directed four outdoor Festivals of Games in Liverpool city centre, and has traveled around the UK, Ireland, Denmark, and Jamaica to lead and talk about games. He has written on dance and cultural issues for The Guardian and other international magazines and periodicals in the UK and abroad.

Lara Almárcegui is an artist based in Rotterdam concerned with the planned and unplanned use of urban space, focusing on rediscovering abandoned or overlooked sites. Her projects include turning a train station into a free hotel in 1997 (Hotel Fuentes de Ebro, Zaragoza) and excavating the floor of the Sala Montcada, Barcelona in 2004, restoring it to its original state. Recently, Almárcegui has been working on projects which aim to preserve undeveloped wastelands. The artist has had solo shows at FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon (2004), INDEX, Stockholm (2003) and has participated in the 27th São Paulo Biennial, Frieze Art Fair Projects, London and the Liverpool Biennial (2004).

Richard Williams is director of the GraduateSchool of Arts, Culture and Environment at the University of Edinburgh.  He is the author of After Modern Sculpture: Art in the United States and Europe1965-1970 (Manchester: MUP, 2000), The AnxiousCity: English Urbanisation at the End of the Twentieth Century (London, Routledge 2004) and the forthcoming Brazil: Modern Architectures in History (2008). He studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London and Art History at the University of Manchester, and he was previously a lecturer at John Moores University, Liverpool.  He particular areas of interest are the city, contemporary architecture, and museology.

raumlaborberlin began working on issues of contemporary architecture and urbanism in 1999. In various interdisciplinary working teams, they investigate strategies for urban renewal. raumlaborberlin does urban design, architectural design, build, interactive environments and research. For the Liverpool Biennial 2008, raumlaborberlin have created the Kitchen Monument structure as a high profile and unique venue for local people to come together and discuss issues around the changing environment and regeneration. The programme which will unfold in Bootle and South Sefton will look at the impact specific buildings and local resources, such as the Leeds – Liverpool canal, should have on the re-imagining of an area.

Architects, Planning and the Politics of Regeneration

Chaired by Professor Jonathan Harris, University of Liverpool

Joseph Sharples is an author, curator and historian. Since leaving the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool where he was a curator from 1990 – 2001, Sharples has been involved in several architectural research projects, including editing the catalogue of the exhibition Charles Reilly and the Liverpool School of Architecture 1904-1933 (Liverpool U.P., 1996) and researching and writing Liverpool (Pevsner Architectural Guides, Yale U.P., 2004). He is currently based in the Liverpool School of Architecture, where he is studying an archive of 6000 drawings by Culshaw & Sumners, one of Victorian Liverpool 's most prolific architectural firms. 

Will Alsop’s firm is a leading European architectural, masterplanning, urban design, landscape design and multimedia practice. The architect’s philosophy extends from the design of individual buildings to embrace broader principles of urbanism and city development. By abandoning the hegemony of an acceptable style, he has rendered the whole process of architecture one of increasing fluidity and transparency - a new and refreshing position for architecture. Will Alsop follows a parallel path as an artist, feeling that it is a discipline inseparable from architecture. In 2003, he was awarded 1st Prize for his ‘Fourth Grace’ design for Liverpool.

Sarah Wigglesworth heads her own architectural practice based in London. Aiming to explore the cultural and social context of architecture, the practice is interested in designing sustainable environments and in working with clients and users in making everyday worlds extraordinary. Its best known project to date is the award-winning Straw Bale House and Quilted Office project, an experiment exploring sustainable living on a Brownfield site in North London which uses new construction technologies, some of which are found in an urban setting for the first time. Sarah is Professor of Architecture at The University of Sheffield and was awarded an MBE in 2003.

Jonathan Meades has written and performed in some fifty television films on subjects such as the utopian avoidance of right angles, the influence of tertiary syphilis on High Victorian design and the deleterious legacy of garden cities. He is well known for his television series about architecture, Abroad with Jonathan Meades which look at neglected forms of British architecture such as caravan parks and golf courses, and at the place that famous buildings hold in the British popular imagination. They are the expression of his preoccupation with places and with the properties they reflect: fantasy and necessity, escape and expectation, individual assertion and collective fear.

‘City Life: Poverty and Power around the World’

Chair: Professor Felipe Hernandez, University of Liverpool

Saskia Sassen is the Lynd Professor of Sociology and a member of the Committee on Global Thought, at Columbia University. Recent publications include Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton U. P. 2006) and A Sociology of Globalization (Norton 2007). She wrote a lead essay in the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture Catalogue and has completed a five-year project on sustainable human settlement for UNESCO, published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers). Her comments have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, Newsweek International and the Financial Times among other periodicals.

Ou Ning is an artist, filmmaker, curator and researcher who documents the spaces of poverty and flux in large Chinese cities. As a curator, he co-founded Get it Louder (2005, 2007), and organized a sound project at Battersea Power Station, London for the Serpentine Gallery in 2006. As an artist, he has organised urban research and documentation projects such as San Yuan Li for the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and Borders, Illegal Zones and UrbanVillages for the first Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/ Architecture. Living and working in Beijing, he is co founder of Alternative Archive, a platform for various cultural practices in Southern China.

John Belchem has written and published extensively on modern British social, political and cultural history. Professor Belchem is now Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool, joining in 1980 as Director of Combined Honours in Arts, going on to be Head of the School of History and then Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for three years in 2004, enabling the completion of a set of major publications on Liverpool including a new edition of Merseypride: Essays in Liverpool Exceptionalism, Liverpool 800: Culture, Character and History and Irish, Catholic and Scouse: the History of the Liverpool-Irish, 1800-1939.

Artist Led Mystery Tours

John Davies was born in Sedgefield, England in 1949 and moved from Cardiff to Liverpool in 2001. His work has been widely exhibited and published in Europe and he has worked on numerous museum and cultural exhibition projects, particularly in the UK, France and Italy. He was short-listed for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008 for his photographic exhibition and book, “The British Landscape” and will be showing at The New Art Gallery, Walsall, from 27 June to 31 August 2008. Davies is continually working on his Ourground project concerning open public space, where he documents the changes but is also actively involved in questioning the political process of the change in public land use in Liverpool. He is currently finalising a photography book for the Culture Company’s Cities on the Edge project - the results of which will be exhibited at NOVAS/ CUC in November 2008 in Liverpool.

From distant beginnings in ceramic design, Nina Edge has developed work which toys with the boundaries of relational aesthetics. Using materials as disparate as chocolate, cocaine, cash and camouflage, factory production methods and service industry protocols, she re-plays mismatches of power. In the words of Alex Heatherington (2007), “Edge's recent work looks at the industrial, emotional and gendered history of fabrics and its present tense manifestations. Using workshop processes she presents and merges print with punishment, mannequin with mistrust, embroidery with extremism. Edge affixes, through an examination of fabric, war with poise, fashion with explosiveness, vogue with violence. Her work is saturated with a vigilant sense of disquiet”.

Imogen Stidworthy's work addresses aspects of language in her sound and video work and large installations. "My focus is on how we communicate - what are the roles of speech and language in performing and defining communication? Working with speech as a sculptural material opens out dimensions of space, body, sound, architecture, thought and language of the voice". Stidworthy's work is exhibited widely; recent shows include Documenta 12, Kassel (2007), the Thessaloniki Biennale (2007) and the Shanghai Biennale (2006), “Be What You Want but Stay Where You Are” at Witte de With, Rotterdam (2005) and ‘Governmentality’ at Miami Art Central (2004). Recent solo shows include ‘Get Here’ at Galerie Hohenlohe, Vienna (2006) and “Dummy” at FRAC Bourgogne. Imogen is an a guest professor at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna and an Advising Researcher at the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht. Her work is in the collections of FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. She lives in Liverpool.

The Art Organisation (TAO) has been operating in Liverpool for several years and shows concern for the regeneration of disused properties and the introduction of arts to the community. Through legally acquiring buildings from their owners on a non-financial equation for a temporary basis, TAO has developed major projects in London, Liverpool, Nottingham and Kent. Approaching dereliction as inspirational and the process of making these spaces habitable empowering, TAO is a grass roots organisation with an increasingly spreading artist network. They assist in the promotion of artists by providing opportunities to exhibit and show their work. Accessibility to affordable studios, workshop and rehearsal space is offered and provided to a network of artists, musicians, actors and performers nationwide and internationally.

Postgraduate Research Fora

'Creative Dwellings: City Space in Artistic Imaginings and Everyday Life'

Chaired by Paul Sullivan, Static, Liverpool

Gavin MacDonald

MA Candidate (Visual Culture) – MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University

New threads for old labyrinths: moving bodies, ‘trace-works’ and the practiced city

Anil Pallan

MA Candidate (Architecture and Urbanism) – Manchester School of Architecture

Exploration Subtopia: The Urban Art of Regeneration

Maria Prieto

PhD Candidate – University of Navarre, Spain

Plural Artistic Contributions to Urban Policy

James Mansell

PhD Candidate (History) – Univeristy of Manchester

The Anthropological Ear and the Aural Politics of the Everyday in British Documentary Films

Ian Fletcher

MA Candidate (Architecture and Urbanism) – Manchester School of Architecture

Future Visions, Architectures of Technological Idealism

 

'Building Utopias? Architecture, Planning and Urban Memory'

Chaired by Richard Koeck, City in Film, University of Liverpool

 

Marcia Lopes

PhD Candidate (Social Anthropology) – University of Texas

Utopia to whom?: Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies within the Urban Space of the Brasilia

Simon Swietochowski

MA Candidate (Architecture) – Manchester School of Architecture

Free-Energy City

Stavros Alifragkis

PhD Candidate (Architecture) – University of Cambridge

Totality, visions of utopia and their intersection with architecture

Nick Ferguson

PhD Candidate (Fine Art) - Goldsmiths College, University of London

Remembering the Future: Cultural Memory and the Politics of Transformation

Owen Hatherley

(Political Aesthetics) – Birkbeck College, London

An Archaeology of the New Brutalism – Streets in the Sky, Modernist Rookeries and Future Ruins

 

'Mapping Exclusion: Social Control and The Politics of Zoned City Space'

Chaired by Les Roberts, City in Film, University of Liverpool

 

Pat Naldi

PhD Candidate - University of the Arts London

SEARCH (Naldi’s own artwork using CCTV surveillance of Newcastle and Adelaide

Leonardo Cadena

MA Candidate (Architecture and Urbanism) – Manchester School of Architecture

Slums + Urban Agriculture: To achieve a Sustainable City in Bogotá, Colombia

Vikram Kuashal and Oliver Smith

MA Candidate (Landscape and Urbanism) – Manchester School of Architecture

The post cultural city – re-mapping cultural memory

Andrew Johnson

PhD Candidate (Anthropology) – Cornell University

Rebuilding Lanna: Consuming and Constructing the Past in the New City