Amalia Pica, ‘I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are’ (2011-2012)
Sculpture based on the Echevaria plant, a species native to South America but popular in domestic environments world-wide due to its ability to thrive under any condition.
Residents of Tower Hamlets are invited to look after the sculpture (hand carved by Pica in pink granite) for one week, then passing it on to the next participant. This exchange happens every Saturday throughout the year. The sculpture’s travels will be recorded on a ‘lending card’, serving as a document of the meetings and exchanges between neighbours that made its journey possible. In June 2012, the sculpture will return to the gallery.
Ruth Ewan, ‘A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World’ (2003)
A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World is a CD jukebox, sitting between digital and analogue technologies which contains a growing collection of songs addressing a spectrum of social issues, some directly political in motive, some vaguely utopian and some chronicling specific historic events. The archive currently contains over 2,000 tracks, with no more than two by the same artist, which are ordered into over seventy categories such as feminism, land ownership, poverty, civil rights and ecology.
