For Immediate Release: 17 March, 2005 www.letherium.org
Re-inventing Museums, Design Competitions,
and Car Parks
The Manchester Letherium Ideas competition (ML:IDEAS) is not what it seems.
At first view, it has all the trappings of a traditional architectural ideas competition, complete with fact-filled website (www.letherium.org), strict deadlines, saccharine messages from organizers, an international jury and a plethora of images and technical information for entrants.
On further investigation, however, this competition – to build a new kind of storage facility for cultural artefacts in Manchester (UK) – becomes something altogether different: a conceptual artwork that uses the trope of an architectural competition to investigate Manchester's dynamic urban morphologies and mythologies, in both theoretical and practical terms.
Implemented by Manchester based researchers and artists Rebecca Duclos and David Ross, ML:IDEAS is thus a competition of a different order, formulated to address the sticky and perennial problem of artefact disposal from cultural institutions and, in the process, offer a critique of urban regeneration efforts. Competitors are viewed as collaborators, and while there are no financial awards, the benefits are far ranging for those wishing to enter.
“The ML:IDEAS competition provides an opportunity for architects, designers and artists to engage in a design exercise without the usual trepidations and limitations of a ‘real’ project” said David Ross.
“Of course there is also the possibility that a submission might win too, and gain some exposure from that”, said Ross. “It’s not everyday an office wins a competition for a non–existent building, sponsored by a non–existent Corporation which has been created to venerate a non-existent institution”.
All finalists' submissions will be displayed at a public launch for the project on the fitting date of 1 April 2005, at Cornerhouse in Manchester.
Central to the project’s contemporary fiction is the historical spectre of a once great, now non-existent 19th century collecting club called the Manchester Letherium Society. Due to episodes of mismanagement and, more critically, a few incendiary Luftwaffe bombs in 1940, it no longer exists. Sixty years on (so the story goes), a group of concerned citizens band together, spurred on by the promise of Millennium/Lottery funds, to form a new kind of Manchester Letherium, one whose stated goal is to provide for “the housing of de-accessioned objects from cultural and heritage sites in the UK.” (from the competition web site)
Each of the project’s archival and artefactual components offers insightful, experimental, and often humourous commentaries on Manchester's particular urban character as a centre for the exchange of economic and cultural commodities, both past and present. These pseudo-authentic elements also provide a wealth of materials for potential competitors in the ML:IDEAS competition to consider.
Competition Information
Response to the competition has been widespread, with submissions and emails from architects’ offices and artists alike. Duclos and Ross have received submissions from practitioners based in Montevideo, London, Toronto and, of course, Manchester. The proposals ranged from buildings that would be completely buildable to highly speculative theoretical propositions (including one to install a blackhole in the center of Manchester!)
Jury members for the competition were:
* Mark Dion (USA) Visual Artist
* J.Morgan Puett (USA) Designer/Visual Artist
* Dr. Samuel Alberti (UK) Lecturer in Museology, University of Manchester
* Professor Grahame MacDougall (UK) Manchester School of Architecture
* Trevor Boddy (CND) Critic/Writer
* Peter Yeadon (CND) Architect and Assistant Professor of Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design
15 competition finalists will be displayed (along with a collection of
artefacts from the 'original' Letherium) at a public launch of the project on 1 April 2005 at Cornerhouse Gallery, Manchester. Winners of five different awards will be announced at the launch.
Background:
“The whole project started when we were working for an artist-in-residence programme at The Manchester Museum. While there, we noticed adverts in professional museum journals for ‘unwanted’ objects and were surprised to find that there are thousands of redundant artefacts sitting in the UK’s cultural institutions just waiting to be dispersed.
“Due to the Museums and Galleries Act, these objects usually have to be given to other registered cultural institutions but, of course, other institutions rarely want them, because they already have objects of their own they are trying to re-home.
“So, we came up with the idea of an institution whose entire raison d’etre would be to accept all the stuff that no one wanted. Its legislated mandate would be to take in all the deaccessioned objects that other institutions could not or did not want to keep, and to offer these items a new ‘life’ in an institution that could be decidedly ‘un-museum like’. Essentially we were advocating the creation of a ‘culture composter’.
“We invented a name – the Manchester Letherium (named after the Greek river of forgetting) - and started to think about how we could get an institution like this going.
“Originally, we thought we would try to get some funding together, write a feasibility study or two, and see if there was any interest within the museums and gallery community in the UK. But instead we decided to use our resources to construct a fiction about a plausible institution, complete with an impeccably researched history and an architecturally viable future. We brought on collaborators Samuel Alberti and Elizabeth Kramer (historians), as well as Peter Seal (visual artist), then chose an appropriate location in central Manchester – a former warehouse site, now a car park – and everything flowed from there.
“The idea of fictional architectures have been with us for a long time – Piranasi, Ledoux, Archigram – they all experimented with elements of the built environment as a way of saying something about the time and place they were in. The Manchester Letherium project does that too, but uses a para-architectural gesture, acknowledging that the way our cities and buildings end up has as much to do with slick marketing campaigns and well-connected board members as it does with innovative design. We also thought that this idea of the Manchester Letherium had much more potential as a work of fiction than as a dull, statistic-filled report – that, as an invented institution with its own history, politics and intrigue, the idea would have a much greater chance of attaining some sort of cultural currency.
“Overall, we hope that the project will act as a catalyst for wider
discussions on the intertwined nature of urban regeneration, architectural design, and museological culture. The way cities treat unwanted spaces and buildings can teach us a lot about how we relate to our unwanted artefacts. And vice versa . We’ve used the vehicle of an architectural competition – with all of its verve and enthusiasm – as a way to look at the decidedly unsexy problem of artefact disposal.
“In a way, we’re just doing the legwork. The concept of a ‘Letherium’ could be pursued on a more realistic level... It represents a very viable solution to the very pragmatic problem of artefact dispersal and storage. Who knows, maybe today’s ML:IDEAS competitors will be tomorrow’s designers for an actual Letherium”.
Biographies
Duclos’ writing has appeared in several publications, including the
Leicester Museum Studies series (The Future of Collecting 1999; Exploring Science in Museums 1996); in various journals (MUSE, Museums National, Museum News); as well as in exhibition texts for artists, Spring Hurlbut, Andrew Hunter and Panya Clark Espinal.
David Ross (b.1966, Canada), a visual artist since the mid-1980’s, has in the last five years explored various architectural propositions with a particular interest in the practical and psychological problems associated with notions of storage and decay. Whether focusing on objects, bodies, time, or spatial memory, Ross’ projects propose ‘solutions’ that are plausible even in their fictionality, and have taken the form of art installations, architectural proposals, and graphic design.
In addition to his architecturally based research, Ross has participated in and/or curated over 30 visual arts exhibitions in North America and Europe. He has also authored and co-authored a number web based design projects, including web sites for the Faculty of Architecture Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto, the Manchester Museum’s Alchemy project, and the
Manchester Letherium. He holds a Masters of Architecture degree from the University of Toronto, 2002.
Duclos/Ross’ interest in exploring the intersection between art,
architecture and research was recently recognised (November 2004) through an invitation to attend the Informal Architecture residency at The Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada). In addition to the Manchester Letherium project, upcoming projects include the production of an experimental film called La Region Ligne Droite; design development of a waterproofing system for bicycle commuters, compilation of an anthology on the nature of translating,
and inclusion in the anthology Voice/Articulation (2006). Duclos and Ross are currently based in Manchester, England.