Containers Project – Artist Run Initiative Project: cabin exchange

The Artist members of Cabin Exchange, a Glasgow based art collective, work as facilitators of events, curating site specific and site sympathetic artworks, using storage containers as the platform. Cabin Exchange projects are generated by research and exploration carried out by selected artists.

At the Next Wave Containers Village the members of cabin exchange are having a go at using the container space to carry out a project with a similar working ethic themselves. Looking to propose an idea that coincided with the type of temporal works that have taken place previously they wanted to create an opportunity that would engage with audiences to create a situation or event.

 

The thinking behind the proposal seeks to employ the opportunity to exploit the very nature of the containers placed in the context of such a village, as communal, multifunctional and creative spaces.

The idea is interested in the capital or capitalistic economy that is normally associated with the containers when functioning as vessels of private interest in the ordinary day-to-day context of the city. The storage container usually contributes to a longer-term transformation of a city’s physical fabric, economy, identity and empire. They symbolise a network of the worldwide distribution of wealth - trucking, shipping, cargoing, freighting, shifting, moving - seemingly with an ease of transition, access-all-areas and an air unaccountability. This ubiquitous metal object is a symbol of change, something we see as largely beyond our control and we accept as given.

 

Can we move one, even just an inch?

The method, Tug of Cabin.

 

The event on Sunday the 26^th, made up of the people we have managed to source - it could be two hundred, it could be two - will attempt to pull using a large rope a 20ft by 10ft by 8ft steel storage container. The whole process of finding people to tug the 20ft storage container will be recorded and using the container as a social space for meeting, interacting, researching, documenting and presenting this information will be an integrative part of the project.

 

Through experience, communication and exchange we hope to foster relationships within diverse communities to release an idea that will become a reality, working with individuals and bring them together to form a collective mass with a commonality to play a role in something larger than them selves.

The communication and collaborative relationship is the key to the projects evolution, irrespective of the task at hand that may sound unlikely or even impossible. This collaboration with different groups and individuals gives the work a strong sense of identity, which no one person – artist or otherwise – could achieve.

 

cabin exchange

Containers Project – Artist Run Initiative Project

Next Wave’s Containers Project will bring to Melbourne artist run galleries, centres, cooperatives, collectives and groups from across the Commonwealth as part of a major group exhibition. Shed 14, a warehouse on a pier in Melbourne’s dockland precinct, will be occupied from 15 to 26 March 2006 by an international community of artists – each with their own shipping container as an exhibition, presentation or work space. Groups are invited to submit proposals in response to the theme Empire Games.
Works presented within the containers may include installations, performances, gallery style exhibitions and studios, and may consist of any contemporary media.
The containers will be supplied (in Australia) with a power source and will be housed indoors in a warehouse with 20 – 60 other groups. The space will be configured so that groups from across the Commonwealth present their own unique exhibition in a larger, shared space. A key goal of this project is to introduce artist groups from different countries to each other.

..................... ..................... ..................... ..............................................text - Next Wave