Day 6 - Collage manifesto

"Destruction

My art piece talks about the human intervention in nature. The bottom of the page represents earth with all its various textures (ex: leaves, rocks, feathers etc). Most of the natural materials were found on walks during the lake district trip. Next, I started overlaying paper, pieces of plastic bags, tickets and metal wires to represent human intervention. When I added the rusty wheels, I was thinking about the industrial revolution and the amount of damage it brought to the lake district. The Manchester School of Architecture also was purposely added because our industry, along with construction are from today’s most environmentally damaging industries and we, as students are responsible for making a change soon." - Farah Arar

Day 6 - Collage manifesto

"Untitled” explores how different rural and city life affects the way we choose our materials for building projects. The verticality of the composition from the hand and the neon earplug draws attention to the wastefulness of resources around us. The ‘hand of god’ holding onto the piece of plastic also brings to light the (plastic) waste we produce within the architectural world. It is a critique on how we have been treating our surroundings which falls into the Dada criteria of using art as a trigger to discussions in our political and everyday lives." - Chloe Chan

Day 6 - Collage manifesto

"My piece is an illustration of nature’s beauty from the morning to the evening. I used colours to suggest the atmosphere of time; yellow as the brightness of the sun during the morning and black as the darkness of the evening. Through contrasting, they are still connected through the natural forms of the countryside (such as leaves/pinecones etc). Each colour produces a distinctive response of how the greenery looks against it, portraying different perceptions and forms of beauty" - Sonali Mathur

Day 6 Collage manifesto

"The Dada-style collage represents a walk in the Lake District countryside. It has little order and no direct route, something which is unusual to find within the context of a city or town. Urban settlements are structured and littered with landmarks all competing for centre stage, whereas the rural is ambiguous and filled with subtlety. The colours of the collage are soft and muted to represent this. There was little order in its conception as I wanted the collage to be created organically and in line with the Dada notion of conscious ‘non-art’, as well as the disorganised nature of the rural." - Grace Conway

Day 3 Filming in the City

After the discussion of our storyboards yesterday, the team has gone out to the city centre to take footages of the bustling city life which will later be compared and contrasted to the footages shot in the quaint countryside (lake district!) and to see if there are some overlapping between spaces and surroundings.

The idea is to build up a library of footage we can use to make a short documentary film that talks about the rural issues of Britain, comparing the different lifestyles and to explore the uncertain future for the countryside post-Brexit all whilst using dada collaging techniques.

Day 2 Storyboarding Workshop

Coming back from an extensive day of talks yesterday, the group has set out different themes we wanted to explore for the next weeks.

We begin the day by putting together four different groups exploring the different issues regarding Dadaism and the countryside. The issues to be explored are countryside's role in promoting sustainable lives; Dadaism and the migration of ideas in the countryside as the artists and architects fled Nazi Germany; return to the countryside and the contrast to the city. After rigorous discussions between the different groups, we then started to draw out our visions and ideas for the film.

We will later combine the storyboards and present them in the form of a dada style collage. By changing the storyboard to a dada collage, it encourages us to visualise spaces we wanted to present very differently and that helps with presenting ideas in the future.

Conceptual Stage

Earlier on in our process, we sat around and put together collages that best represented our personal interpretation of the brief provided by our collaborator. It has been brought to my attention that the dadaism is a very important aspect with the Merz barn and the concept is to incorporate some dadaism ideas into a contemporary rural studio settings.