Artist-architects Catalina Pollak Williamson and Harun Morrison will explore the potential of 'play' and participation as ways to drive urban change and engaged communities, followed by an open conversation.
Catalina Pollak Williamson is an artist, architect and urban activist working and researching cross-disciplinary processes that use participation, play and urban performance as methodologies to drive urban and social change. She is particularly interested in the potential of play as a relational process that can contribute to the development of capabilities and civic agency in the production of more empowered and engaged citizens.
Since 2012, she has run Public Interventions, a collaborative platform for the production of socially engaged participatory projects concerned with the dynamics of contested urban contexts. Through the production of participatory socio-spatial interventions the work questions new forms of space production and the development of temporary practices of commoning to connect and engage communities with their built environment.
Harun Morrison is one half of They Are Here (f.2006), a collaborative practice established and steered with Helen Walker. They are currently based in London and on the River Lea. Their work can be read as a series of context specific games. The entry, invitation or participation can be as significant as the game’s conditions and structure. Through these games, they seek to create ephemeral systems and temporary, micro-communities that offer an alternate means of engaging with a situation, history or ideology. They Are Here work across media and types of site, particularly civic spaces. Institutions they have developed or presented work include: CCA Glasgow, Grand Union, Konsthall C (Stockholm), Southbank Centre, South London Gallery, Studio Voltaire, STUK (Leuven) and Tate Modern. They Are Here are currently in the building phase of a new community garden for Dagenham, commissioned by CREATE London. They have been developing this project since 2017, Beacon Garden will open to the pubic this Summer.
A City of Ideas event, supported by Arts Council England.