About
Re:Turn – Portavillion Splore 2012.
An UP Projects, Splore and Cut Collective collaboration.
Cut Collective is pleased to announce their return to their favourite summer event, “Splore Music and Arts Festival”.
This year the collective will be flexing their art minds and extending their collaborative practice by engaging with new and past collaborators on their most ambitious Splore project yet.
With the help of Splore Arts Trust and the British Council, Cut Collective has embarked upon a journey with curator Emma Underhill from the London based public art organization UP Projects. Keeping inline with their dedication to fostering collaborations, the collective have chosen to bring back long time collaborator and architect Jasper Middleton who is currently living and working in Paris, France, as well as iconic Auckland artist “Gasp”.
In an extension of their previous Splore projects, Cut Collective have ramped up the size and scope of their exhibition practice and are developing an iteration of the “Portavillion” concept. The “Portavillion” is essentially a mobile, expanding public art project that started in London in 2008 by Emma Underhill of UP Projects.
This ongoing project explores the possibilities for temporary, large-scale public art, and is as much a celebration of ‘common ground’ and open public spaces as it is a cultural event. The Cut Collective crew is keen to lend their perspective to the project and see how it can be adapted to a New Zealand context while working alongside Emma Underhill to create their interpretation of the “Portavillion” brief. They view this as an opportunity tointegrate art in the community and foster the idea of public spaces being aesthetically enhanced as well as functional.
Cut Collective see this installation as creating a community focal point for the festival-goers. By drawing upon the notion of reuse, refuse (ref-use), return, recycling and up-cycling, Cut Collective has collected and produced over 400 shipping pallets, boxes and signs. The collective have temporarily taken these essential items out of the consumption cycle and intend to reconfigure them in a new fashion far removed from their original purpose. This stems from idea that empty pallets represent an untold number of products and consumables (that are in one way or another destined for land-fill), and poses the question “What becomes of the vessels created to hold goods, once the products have reached their destination?”
Ultimately, Cut Collective hopes their Portavillion looks at what can be diverted from one purpose to another and how these principles can be applied to extend it’s provision as a public recreational space that enhances, surprises and questions all at the same time.
