We went for a CCTV sniffing tour around the Olympic Stadium during the 24hrs Olympic State event at See gallery.
All night talks, discussions, films and artist’s work + performance.
In conjunction with Jim Woodall’s Olympic State installation, ‘See’ will stay open for a full 24 hours from 6pm on the 5th May until 6pm on the 6th May.
For two weeks in December 2010, artist Jim Woodall occupied the rooftop of a building overlooking the Olympic Park construction site. Sleeping in a self-made hunter’s hide constructed from locally found materials he watched the vast site through a bank of CCTV monitors. For this exhibition, the hut is reinstalled in the gallery, acting as a monument to the legacy of the performance. The entire two weeks of recorded CCTV footage will be replayed on the interior screens. Lining the walls, screen shots of dawns, dusks and ‘events’ will show an abstracted timeline.
Artist Jim Woodall (CutUp Collective), Isaac Marrero (Birkbeck College) and Cristina Garrido Sánchez (Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths) have programmed the 24 hour event, presenting talks, discussions, films and artist’s work. A performance by Solina HiFi (CutUp Collective), barbeque and plenty of whisky coffee will keep you up all night. No beds available.
The Olympics can arguably be described as a laboratory for the neoliberal city utopia; after all, the Games represent the success of a brand and an event based on a combination of massive urban renewal, dodgy governance, hugely profitable advertising and broadcasting contracts, the corporatisation and militarisation of public space, and the criminalisation of dissent.
The Olympics depend, to a large scale, on their ability to operate on a clean, consensual space: without history, without discontents, without opposition. The Olympic Park is the fantasy of such space, Jim Woodall’s Olympic State installation is one of its disruptions.The Olympics Games is the strategic occupation of the social and economic space of the city, but they allow, or even invite, for a tactical response. The goal of this 24h marathon of activities, echoing the 24hr surveillance of the site, is to bring together artists, activists and researchers challenging the Olympic dream.
We wish to amplify Jim Woodall’s radical gesture by summoning an assemblage of talks, films, interventions, performances and concerts which are part to the myriad of militant productions taking place in the city right now. In particular, we are interested in exploring the dynamics of urban renewal brought to East London by the Olympics and the issue of surveillance and control of public space. This day-long event aims at providing a generous and welcoming space for discussion.