Chris Barr
 
 
 
   

 

 

 

 

 

 

> Artist's Statement <

> Curriculum Vitae <

 

 

Progress:

City breaks
(Nov. 2004)

 

City breaks
(Jan. 2005)

 

City breaks
(Mar. 2005)

 

 

Address:
18 Albany Rd, Basement Flat,
Montpelier
Bristol, BS6 5LH.
Telephone: 07968 745 781.
Email: crstofr2000@yahoo.co.uk

 

City Breaks
Chris Barr, 2nd Jan. 2005

 



Under the working title of ‘walking dialogue’ my approach to the city break in Helsinki has been largely formed whilst negotiating the streets themselves. In search of a way in perhaps, my initial impetus has been to collect the maps that I have persuaded people to draw for my own orientation as a means of perusing an alternative cartography. In doing so the city has revealed itself to me as the spaces between streets, a plethora of varied encounters and expressions that are only possible through the generosity of its people and their time.

The desire to develop my ideas surrounding the distinction made by the physical city and its community in ‘walking dialogue’ has continued through the production of architectural models, which play with the displacement of the relationships with scale and other such details. In any city there are architectural idiosyncrasies and my immediate observations of Helsinki were formed in relation to the overwhelming amount of text that sprawls across the buildings in the more commercial parts of the city. As a stranger to these signs and their meanings the texts seemed to emphasise the un-reconciled contradictions between the modernist agenda of such pioneers as Alvar Aalto and the ambivalence towards spatial boundaries compounded by the omni-presence of the international style skyscraper and the semi-transparent membrane of its all over glass surface.

In addition to this I am hoping to install a heater outside of the Muu gallery in Helsinki, which will serve as a simple gesture designed to create a dialogue between sculptural intervention and architectural improvement.