Basso Leonard Architectural Collaborative (BLAC)
Permission To Mash Up The Space
by Christopher Laird
The Launch of Basso Leonard Architectural Collaborative (BLAC)
I was invited to attend the launch of an architectural firm, Basso Leonard Architectural Collaborative (BLAC) one evening early in May, I arrived to the sound of Ray Holman, Brian Perkins and friends, The Ray Holman Ensemble, playing high in the building unseen by the crowd gathering in the yard… the sound of the city? Drinks being served at a bar under the mango tree, little eats being passed around by confident little children. A bandstand was set up at the back framed on one side by an installation by Robert Young of The Cloth, a scaffolding draped with his trademark white cotton with appliquéd designs and on the other by Akazuru’s stuffed burlap shapes, ropes and strings, strung from the building’s gables to the ground like a ruin or a great tree hosting epiphytes. The traditional form of this St. Clair house at once facilitating and appropriated by the irrepressible spinning constructions of a textile Anancy. Dean Arlen’s red arrow sculptures hung overhead from the buttresses.
Collin Basso & Sean Leonard
Entering the front door of the building I am immediately enveloped by more of Akazuru’s shapes, draped along the steps, like pods from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, with trailing string and strands winding up the staircase diverting your footfall challenging your handhold in its provision of options. Paul Kain’s ‘light well’ supplies the light overhead.
Then I encounter, immersed in all this, on a wall at the second landing, Terry Smith’s graphic essay on Jamaican images out of Ideogram Engine, a design company located in Jamaica. I peer at them, tourist Jamaica versus real Jamaica, No Problem vs. Problem. Nothing new in the analysis but the meticulously composed images suggested an argument resolved in a new comic strip facility as box, square and line suggest, but see the architecture only in its complex structure and composition. I moved on, still meditating on the puzzles posed, still trying to see patterns in fractured space.
At the top of the stairs a room with a video being projected; more of Terry’s images. Ray (Holman) and Brian etc. walk through the room with their instruments having finished their invisible but haunting set. Their sudden physical manifestation there with pans in hand, moving in front of the images on the screen, disturb the space, change the perspective. Reminds me that lines remain on paper but architecture involves the physical, our bodies, how we feel in spaces with each other. The translation of line to space is the challenge; intellectual becoming inter-actual.The video is another elaborate discourse like the prints on the landing, but this one movi
ng and accompanied by sound, carefully chosen sounds of Jamaica. The images contend, establish themselves, are dissolved and superseded by others. The video represents a great deal of really careful work. Hours in the editing studio, days gathering images and sounds and processing them to achieve desired effect. As a worker in the medium myself I am so impressed with the focus, the creative concentration required that I can only marvel at the effort. The question surfaces: or is it a statement? – Whoever made this work had no time to design a structure in the physical world let alone build it.
The argument rolls on relentlessly, feeding the eye and the mind and the ear with artful composition but having made the analysis what architecture do you create? I saw some aerial maps, some possible sites? No emotion but the weary indignation at ignorance and injustice and sense of impotence occasion whenever this predicament is articulated, no matter how skillfully; like Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt. I’m excited by the creativity, the commitment, the obvious facility and hunger for the vision, but I’m looking for the architecture that should erupt from the analysis, the opportunity presented by the problem that’s No Problem! I can’t see it, I can’t feel it. What am I missing, am I really blind or is it just not there? I looked again at the programme and see that The Engine is a design firm comprised of trained architects, it does not say it is an architectural firm. So the architecture is in the design then. O.K. hold on to that. But still I would have loved to have seen what architectural ideas – structures for people to live in, work in and experience – came out of all that work. Maybe now the video is made…
Terry’s video is followed by Mario Lewis’s video art piece juxtaposing Cuba’s celebration Workers’ Day in Havana and a US Independence day street parade in Athens, Maine, USA. Enigmatic, provocative, elegiac and sinister.
Dean Arlen
In the next room, almost hidden away in a corner, a bit cramped and flatly lit, is a display of one or two projects by BLAC, the firm that is being launched. At last, some structures. The lodges in the Caroni Swamp with their roofs of discarded plastic drink bottles and solar cells, the proposed mangrove gardens by Kavir Mootoo augmenting and commenting on the natural environment. Some exciting ideas. Some exciting architectural ideas at last. Still only ideas, but at least I can glimpse possibility.
Back outside Mario Lewis is showing his video on The Story of BLAC. Intercut with images of projects by Sean and Colin are brief statements by them about how they got together and the role
they think the architect should play in society. It is, characteristically, modest, understated and short but underlines the sensibility that is already growing from one’s experience of the evenings happenings.
Moyenne, Atheleny, Jaramogi Cultural Workshop and Sheldon Holder’s Twelve takes turns on the bandstand outside bouncing rhythms off Robert’s membranes and weaving them into Akazuru’s web as chords lay down a foundation shifting and changing and surprising. New patterns to the night. The repertoires of original music of indefinable category are testament to the clearing opened by Andre Tanker and others as the blazed a trail of new music in the jungle of the traditional.
Akuzuru
I spot three models each wearing one of Akazuru’s incredible creations, garments of seeming complex structure elaborate texture and impossible conception – textile poems, textural symphonies and architectural conceits. I looked at them posing for a photograph and having only previously seen her work hanging in exhibition halls, express delight at seeing someone else wearing them other than Akazuru herself. I want them to move now. Akazuru says patiently, Wait. Then I see the models are dancers of Sonja Duma’s Metamorphosis group and they embark on a pageant, the three of them, like something out of Kurosawa or Sembene, Minshall or Galliano, dancing with, paying homage to what is described in the programme as a ‘dead tree/fertility figure’ that lies on the ground with seething presence, like a textile version of Fransisco Cabral’s Made in Japan but this one made right here in that space that Akazuru and her fellow artists tonight work in, that space that Sean and Colin want to work in, that space that so many have been working in separately but tonight inhabit together. A space made of mashed up traditional and everyday space, refashioned into new visions.
Akuzuru
As an evening to launch an architectural firm BLAC’s own presence was probably over modest and self effacing. But as a statement of shared sensibility it was probably the most significant event of its kind to be held in the recent times. It brought together artists and their work hitherto operating separately, albeit with sidelong glances at each other but here were able create a world, to almost – no not almost, lets be as daring as they, say it … The evening defined a Movement. BLAC placed itself, this night, in the vanguard of that movement. We expect and hope to see the real work that comes out of that.
Christopher Laird
May 2003
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