The Institute of Proposals

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The Institute of Proposals is built, decorated and inhabited by participants.

It is a place for playful invention and collective conversation.

It comprises of:

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• a gallery space

• a hall

• the grounds

• an internal courtyard

• an empty library

• an apartment

• an industrial kitchen

• an underground space

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The Residency

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L5 Fine Art students are invited to take part in the institutes fourth residency for the month of January 2022, working in groups (minimum of 5) of your peers. The residency invites you to put aside the limits of budgets and real estate to explore imagination, invention and collaboration as strategies for sustaining a practice.

Taking "Andrea's Story" as a staring point, participants will think about how to use, add to, adjust and respond to the institution. For example;

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The institution can house discussions, art works, objects, songs and stories.

Books and articles can be suggested for the library.

Rooms can be decorated with things participants have made or found.

Participants can sit and watch dust collect in the corners of rooms or lie down in one of the bedrooms.

They stick post it notes on the fridge and swap recipes in the kitchen.

They can sing in the bathroom and collect sounds for the garden.

They can read in the library.

They can invite real or imaginary guests round.

They can make objects, drawings, videos, performances for the gallery or host discussions, private views and conferences.

They can post video and sound to play on the television and the radio in the lounge.

They can propose building work, renovations and partnerships with other institutions.

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Collaboration

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The current cultural climate is stimulating an increasing interest in, and need for, collaboration throughout many fields of practice. Collaboration can be a rich learning experience requiring mutual respect, clear communication and a sharing of resources and skills.

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“Generosity and sharing provide an alternative to contemporary individualism and the traditional role of the romantic artist as a solitary genius” - In The Collaborative Turn, (2005) Maria Lind

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”I have seen reliable success in banding together with other artists in your position” White Pube

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The Planning

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For the rest of this week you will start discussions and begin to form groups. Please decide on a name- this can change as ideas evolve. Please nominate one person from your group who will email the group name and a list of participants to Andrea by 10am on Fri 14th Jan  (andrea.stokes@kingston.ac.uk).

Each group will then be invited by email to an initial group tutorial on Mon 17th of January. Students who have not formed a group by that time will be invited to a group set up by staff.

There will be further group tutorials on Mon 24th of January to discuss and support your ideas.

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The Final Presentation

Monday 31st January 10-1pm in room KPTK402

Please share your ideas and show any work your group has made during the residency. Your presentation (15 min max) can consist of any of the below examples;

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Proposal for an Exhibition

Moving image, animation, game 

Performance, event, dance

Story, text, spoken word

Music, song, sound

Model, object, sculpture

Design, plan, diagram

Reading list, publication, manifesto, discussion

Photograph, drawing, painting, print

 

Instagram

Work made during the residency can be uploaded to the Instagram platform. Please note that any work uploaded to this instagram site will automatically appear on this web site in the section called "Works"

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www.instagram.com Username: Instituteofproposals

Password: IOP2020

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Andrea's Story

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About 2 years ago I came home to find an answerphone message from someone I didn’t immediately recognise. It was a woman’s voice and she left a mobile number but it was too broken up for me to catch. It sounded like she was outside, walking along in an almost agitated state. She was asking if I was still teaching and if any of my students would be interested in doing something for her new project called the Institute of Proposals.

 

I was intrigued by the call and the name of the project but I couldn’t quite place her voice. She obviously knew me and it nagged away at me for a while but I eventually forgot about the message. Then, one day last summer I was working in my studio on an unusually hot day. There was something in the quality of the rumbling traffic and the suffocating heat that released a buried memory in surprising detail. All of a sudden I knew what the phone call had been about. 

 

About 10 years ago I had visited a place not far from where I was brought up with an old school friend. She was one of the cool girls and I wasn’t particularly close to her but we had both loved our art teacher, and studied art, and our paths occasionally crossed. On one of these occasions she was more friendly than usual which I attributed to the dreary quality of the conference we were at. I remember that it was very hot in the venue and when the final speaker of the day bailed out with heat exhaustion my friend offered to drive me home via an exciting place she really wanted to show me. She said it wasn’t far but it took almost an hour to get there and as she drove I began to feel increasingly disorientated and irritated. I couldn’t shake off the impression that we were driving in circles and although she talked incessantly and animatedly about the potential of the space, I never did quite get to the bottom of where we were going, who owned it or if we had permission to be there.

 

By the time we turned off yet another busy main road I was really wishing I had just got the train back to my parents house but all of a sudden the road narrowed, we took a sharp left that she almost missed and a few minutes later turned into a well made dusty track, through an open wooden gate and pulled up outside a building. 

 

I was dying for a wee and so I jumped out of the car and stumbled into the shade of the trees that lined the driveway. When I returned to the ticking car my friend had disappeared. I was standing in front of a large building that didn’t look particularly old but it didn’t look new either. There were two massive wooden doors that looked like they hadn’t be opened for some time and to the right of them a small side door that was slightly ajar. 

 

I remember feeling uneasy about trespassing but I couldn’t see any signs and my head had started to ache in the punishing sun so I stepped inside. I found myself immediately in a large and impressive hall that smelt of dust, the ceiling was high and the sound of my footsteps on the wooden floorboards echoed around the space. I walked to the far end of the hall underneath a state of the art lighting rig towards a stage flanked by heavy curtains. I followed the sound of running water through a frosted glass door on my right and into an industrial sized kitchen where I found my friend leaning against one of the massive stainless steel sinks with the tap running, drinking a glass of water. The kitchen had three catering sized fridges and it still had crockery and pots and pans and smelt faintly of grease. My friend started opening cupboards, banging the doors and dragging out tablecloths and kitchen accessories, which made me feel uncomfortable. Looking through the kitchen window I noticed an internal courtyard and overgrown garden. I got the impression that it took up the same footprint as the hall, a kind of inside out mirror image and as far as I could make out the only access was through the kitchen, so I headed out through the unlocked door.

 

It was a shock to be in the sun again but I picked my way across the tangle of foliage towards a clear section in the corner that turned out to be a kind of trap door. I was able to open it a bit and make out some well-made concrete steps that led down into the darkness. I could hear from the falling soil and stones that the space below the trap door was big which despite the heat made me shiver. I closed the trapdoor and stood on top of it listening to the distant sound of rumbling traffic and trying to make sense of the place.

 

The square courtyard was surrounded on all four sides by interconnected buildings. In front of me was the huge external brick wall of the hall, windowless and covered in ivy. Behind me was a three storey, box-like building that looked like it had been added quite recently. On the left hand side was the rectangular kitchen I had just been in and opposite, flanking the fourth side of the courtyard, I could just make out what looked like a gallery space through dirty windows.

 

I retraced my steps, through the kitchen and crossed the hall towards a heavy sliding door that led into the long thin gallery. It had a simple glass entrance and four big windows in the ceiling that flooded the white walls with harsh sunlight. An almost hidden door at the other end suddenly opened and my friend was shouting at me to come and look at what she called the library but I don’t remember much about that space as she was already heading through a door that led upstairs to a plain but functional apartment. The furnishing was sparse and there was a fake leather sofa in the lounge that was a bit cracked but still in pretty good nick. There was a TV in the room and I noticed a shelf with a VHS player and a row of tapes with handwritten lists that looked like recordings from the TV. My friend darted around the apartment showing me the kitchen and bathrooms and talking ten to the dozen about her ambitious plans for the space and the financial backers she had already lined up. I remember feeling overwhelmed by her manic energy and more than a little put out by her irritated response to my practical questions and her comment that I had ‘always lacked imagination’. Thankfully she left me to explore the third floor bedrooms on my own, and I was surprised to see wallpaper in one of them that I recognized by the designers Timorous Beastie’s.

 

The exuberant pattern seemed to be from another time and place and right next to the bed one of the motifs had been carefully ripped out. I remember thinking that was really funny but also a bit disturbing because it reminded me of Charlotte Gilman’s book The Yellow Wallpaper about a woman incarcerated in her room. I also noticed a copy of the novel Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino on the bedside table, which struck me as a strange coincidence because I’d just finished reading the same book a few days earlier. There was an unpleasant musty smell in the bedroom and as I opened the window I realised that I was looking down into the internal courtyard where I had just been standing.

 

Suddenly an angry pounding on a car horn pierced the stillness making my skin prickle. I closed the window and headed back down the stairs and through an external door that led me round the back of the building, past an array of sheds and discarded furniture and building materials and back round to the front. I could hear the sound of a dog barking and raised voices and arrived to witness a car screeching out of the drive in a cloud of dust.

 

I found my friend with a stony red face, opening her car door and telling me to get in. When I remonstrated that we had left all the doors open she barked at me that ‘everything was under control’ and to ‘get in the car’. As we drove through the gate I noticed two figures sitting in a car with the engine running. I looked over at my friend who drove quickly keeping her eyes fixed straight ahead and didn’t ask any more questions. We spent the journey back to my parent’s house in uncomfortable silence. When she dropped me off she said she wouldn’t come in, she seemed embarrassed and a bit shaken and said something about a misunderstanding and that she would be in touch. Apart from the message on my answerphone I haven’t heard from her since and despite searching for her online I haven’t been able to find any contact details for her or her Institute of Proposals. It’s almost like she’s disappeared.

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