Emerging Lab - Hull (UK)

Anne Thuot is a French performing artist who questions the relation between different societies. She created the character Lydia Richardson through which she questions her own privileges as a « perfect European » through a conflict generating alter-ego.

Retrieve, the latest installement of Lydia Richardson, is a look at the African objects we have in our homes. How do we tell the story of our European colonial heritage via these personal objects - some passed down through generations? What if Lydia Richardson became a public object for all, a sort of voodoo fetish to which we can entrust all the stories of our personal artefacts?

Veronika Tzekova is a creative practitioner who employs primarily intervention and appropriation, and focuses on rethinking and transforming objects, situations and systems. 

Veronica takes football to another level. The shape of the FOOOOTBALLLL pitch is achieved from the basis of the original football šeld to which perpendicularly is added a second identical one. The game is played by four teams of local participants, composing four groups of inhabitants. The participants and viewers are strongly encouraged to perceive the game beyond the original and see it as metaphor for life..

Alexandros started working in the performing arts fišeld in various positions, in the beginning as a video artist, afterwards as a dramaturge and eventually as a performer. Compelled by social developments in Greece and all over Europe, he is now focusing more on contemporary orality, history and its formative influence on public space.

In Distance, a narrator describes a series of post cards, landscapes or tableaus left etched in his child memory with their charm and anxiety. He suggests that we all have our own kind of loneliness, the loneliness of travellers who are surrounded by a space born out of their presence, a distance characterised by their presence which cannot be removed. Although this distance cannot be measured, it needs to be considered.

Marco Barotti is a musician and multimedia artist. In 2007, he joined forces with Plastique Fantastique (Berlin), an art collective specializing in infl›atable urban architecture and interactive sound sculptures. Since 2011, Barotti has also teamed up with Asphalt Piloten, an interdisciplinary group of artists who work to transform public spaces with dance and tape art. 

The project aims to create an audiovisual interference in urban environments through the application of custom-made android birds programmed as musical instruments. The woodpeckers will be positioned in different corners of one chosen spot in the city and play the various ranges of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum. This results in an infišnite soundscape which plays with the resonances of metal urban objects and the surrounding architecture as an invading drum ensemble adding beats and overtones to the city. 

Stefan Rusu is an artist, curator from Moldova, based in Chisinau and Bucharest. He was trained as visual artist and later extended his practice to curating, managing and fundraising projects, editing TV programs, producing experimental films, TV reports and documentaries. Stefan’s artist and curatorial agenda is closely connected to undergoing processes and changes occurred in the post-socialist societies after 1989.

The eponymous “FLAT SPACE” is an architectural structure inspired by the standard flat in Moldavian SSR. Given the impossibility of open, public exhibition of the artistic underground, in the 1970s and 80s it became popular to host art exhibitions in private homes. This module is removed from the context of block of flats and housing estate by the artist Stefan Rusu and placed in public spaces in order to foster the engagement of the community. 

Interactivity, hybridity, collaboration, humour, bastardy, contraband and freedom are essential reference points within which Martin Kochan operates. An element of social engagement, disassociated from tradition, is present in all his projects that take place in the public space. He believes that the movement between different media and the integration of routine work into the process of art, and its transformation from everyday life into a work of art, can critically change how we view everyday life.

Swelling is the body’s disproportionate allergic reaction to foreign substances. Swelling is a metaphor for the critical texts that are floating around the public space and social networks, which, instead of changing the shape of the city, expanding it and enriching its culture, in fact, act like allergens. Swelling is the allergic reaction of traditions to modernity in the uncertain and immature Eastern Bloc countries. The project addresses the swelling ground of the modern city of Brno, which rises like a swelling on the human body caused by insect bites.