Radio Droogdok at Site Festival 2018

We will be sharing new podcasts with artists working, exhibiting and performing for the Site Festival in April 2018.

Radio Droogdok

Resound Radio worked with artist Tara Downs (Miniature Museums), who made an audio exchange with Stroud and Amsterdam for Site Festival 2018. Radio Droogdok made and transmitted podcasts from NDSM and ADM both former shipyards in Amsterdam as well as Landbouwbelang in Maastricht. Tara interviewed artists as well as philosophers, anthropologists and visionaries about urban places in transition. The podcasts are transmitted through Resound Radio online. Podcasts were also be made specially for 'Places In Drift' a collaborative project with Valerie Van Leersum, an artist from NDSM in Amsterdam, who was be our resident artist in the gallery for the SITE Festival Open Studios. 

SVA has followed the evolutionary history of artist run spaces in UK and Europe and was particular inspired by the story of artist spaces set in the industrial docklands of Amsterdam after meeting Bert Hogervorst and Peti Buchel, in 1998, who wrote ‘Turning Tide: The Users Role in the Redevelopment of Harbour Buildings in North-West Europe’.

Radio Droogdok is funded by Arts Council England.

www.radiodroogdok.org

Valerie Van Leersum

Valerie Van Leersum has been creating a body of work, since 2002, driven by her search for the meaning of the concept of home, and the relationship between the ground and identity. For this she uses objects, text, audio, collages and photography in order to convey her work in a fruitful and specific way. The work moves between the ‘factual’ history on one hand and the subjective experience on the other, between documentary and imaginary. In 2007 Valerie Van Leersum built her studio at the former NDSM shipyard in Amsterdam. Inspired by the ideas of artist Constant Nieuwenhuys, this yard has been turned into the largest cultural breeding ground in Europe and is a place that now tries to maintain its independence within the advancing city. Under the theme of ‘Places in Drift’, Valerie Van Leersum will show work that is based on both the industrial and natural transitions o f the NDSM wharf and Stroud.

Tara Downs

Tara works in an artistic partnership with Bart Sabel to create Miniature Museums that fuse museology, art and interactivity using a combination of analogue and digital processes, steam-age engineering, storytelling and a delicate attention to detail. They encourage inquisitive actions by creating a range of ways to trigger lighting, animate automata, activate images and sounds. Miniature Museums content evolves as a bricolage of research, object and story gathering, artistic creations and reinterpretation, ideally as a reciprocal process: with some of their works, they host collecting days, inviting conversations and visitors to contribute content, which is transmuted into the exhibit. Miniature Museums experiment with provoking curiosity – making visible the mechanisms usually unseen, presenting things based on truth but also teetering over the edges of fantasy. This encourages looking again, humorously calling the viewer in-to question.