Concrete Cinema: Everyday Brutalism

Funder

City of Culture, open call

Value

£2,000

Collaborators

Dr Miriam de Rosa for Coventry University, Dr Michael Pigott for University of Warwick, Dr Blanca Regina (University of Kent), Pierre Bouvier Patron, and Ryan Hughes for Coventry Biennial of Contemporary Art.

Project Objectives

Concrete Cinema was a City of Culture funded project that focused on the unique architecture of Coventry and the potentiality of the moving image to redesign and enliven our built environment, as well as on our interaction with it.

Launched in spring 2019, the project involved the residents of Pioneer House, a Brutalist high-rise outside the ring road in Coventry, to favour community engagement and reflect upon the experience of living in the building, the perception, memories and policies connected to it.

Following a working session with the residents of Pioneer House, artist Blanca Regina has been commissioned to rework the materials produced during a workshop into a set of visuals that has been projected onto the surface of the building itself on the occasion of an outdoor projection performance. The show was based on video-mapping techniques and live music to animate the space we inhabit bringing to the community art and innovation.

Impact

The project intersected the cultural strategy devised for the Coventry 2021 UK City of Culture bid and offered a methodology to establish a connection with the citizenship inspired by the values of impactful research and community engagement. It revolved around the creative possibilities sparkling from the connections of theories and artistic practice with the aim of producing and raise awareness about public space interventions as well as placemaking.

Event photographs